Neural dynamics encoding risky choices during deliberation reveal separate choice subspaces

Human decision-making involves the coordinated activity of multiple brain areas, acting in concert, to enable humans to make choices. Most decisions are carried out under conditions of uncertainty, where the desired outcome may not be achieved if the wrong decision is made. In these cases, humans deliberate before making a choice. The neural dynamics underlying deliberation are unknown and intracranial recordings in clinical settings present a unique opportunity to record high temporal resolution electrophysiological data from many (hundreds) brain locations during behavior. Combined with dynamic systems modeling, these allow identification of latent brain states that describe the neural dynamics during decision-making, providing insight into these neural dynamics and computations. Results show that the neural dynamics underlying risky decision, but not decisions without risk, converge to separate subspaces depending on the subjects preferred choice and that the degree of overlap between these subspaces declines as choice approaches, suggesting a network level representation of evidence accumulation. These results bridge the gap between regression analyses and data driven models of latent states and suggest that during risky decisions, deliberation and evidence accumulation toward a final decision are represented by the same neural dynamics, providing novel insights into the neural computations underlying human choice. HighlightsO_LIHighly accurate decoding can be accomplished with dynamical systems modeling that revealed distinct attractor-like subspaces, one for each of the two options (gamble or safe bet). C_LIO_LIEarly during deliberation, single trial neural trajectories show rapid transitioning between these subspaces, but as the time of choice selection approached, the single trial trajectories converged towards one of the subspaces, whose identity was consistent with the subjects choice. C_LIO_LIThese dynamics are specific to risky decisions as we found classification accuracy dropped to chance for trials where the gamble option was guaranteed to be successful (100% win probability) or unsuccessful (0% win probability). C_LIO_LIThese results suggest that deliberation and evidence accumulation toward a final decision in the presence of any risk can be represented by the same neural dynamics, providing novel insights into the neural computations underlying human choice. C_LI