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Piercing of Consciousness as a Threshold-Crossing Operation

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Kang, YHR 
Petzschner, FH 
Wolpert, DM 
Shadlen, MN 

Abstract

Many decisions arise through an accumulation of evidence to a terminating threshold. The process, termed bounded evidence accumulation (or drift diffusion), provides a unified account of decision speed and accuracy, and it is supported by neurophysiology in human and animal models. In many situations, a decision maker may not communicate a decision immediately and yet feel that at some point she had made up her mind. We hypothesized that this occurs when an accumulation of evidence reaches a termination threshold, registered, subjectively, as an “aha” moment. We asked human participants to make perceptual decisions about the net direction of dynamic random dot motion. The difficulty and viewing duration were controlled by the experimenter. After indicating their choice, participants adjusted the setting of a clock to the moment they felt they had reached a decision. The subjective decision times (tSDs) were faster on trials with stronger (easier) motion, and they were well fit by a bounded drift-diffusion model. The fits to the tSDs alone furnished parameters that fully predicted the choices (accuracy) of four of the five participants. The quality of the prediction provides compelling evidence that these subjective reports correspond to the terminating process of a decision rather than a post hoc inference or arbitrary report. Thus, conscious awareness of having reached a decision appears to arise when the brain’s representation of accumulated evidence reaches a threshold or bound. We propose that such a mechanism might play a more widespread role in the “piercing of consciousness” by non-conscious thought processes.

Description

Keywords

consciousness, decision making, mental chronometry, motion perception, reaction time

Journal Title

Current Biology

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0960-9822
1879-0445

Volume Title

Publisher

Elsevier (Cell Press)
Sponsorship
Wellcome Trust (097803/Z/11/Z)
Royal Society (RP120142)
Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) (RGP0067/2011)
The research was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Eye Institute grant R01 EY11378 to M.N.S., the Human Frontier Science Program to D.M.W. and M.N.S., the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (Noreen Murray Professorship in Neurobiology) to D.M.W., National Eye Institute grant T32 EY013933 to Y.H.R.K., and the René and Susanne Braginsky Foundation and University of Zurich to F.H.P.