Overt visual attention modulates decision-related signals in the frontal cortex

Abstract

When indicating a preference between two options, decision makers are thought to compare and accumulate evidence in an attention-guided process. Little is known about this processs neural substrates or how visual attention affects the representations of accumulated evidence. We conducted a simultaneous eye-tracking and fMRI experiment in which human subjects gradually learned about the value of two food-lotteries. With this design we were able to extend decisions over a prolonged time-course, manipulate the temporal onset of evidence, and therefore dissociate sampled and accumulated evidence. We observed inconsistent correlations of both sampled and accumulated evidence with activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the ventral striatum, and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and more consistent correlations of accumulated evidence with activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). We also found that more gaze on an option increased its choice probability and that gaze consistently amplified accumulated-value signals above and beyond the non-gaze-modulated signals in the pre-SMA and partially in the dlPFC, providing novel evidence that visual attention has lasting effects on decision variables and suggesting that activity in the pre-SMA and dlPFC reflect gaze-weighted accumulated evidence. These results shed new light on the neural mechanisms underlying gaze-driven decision processes.