TY - JOUR
T1 - Sensory Evidence Accumulation Using Optic Flow in a Naturalistic Navigation Task
AU - Alefantis, Panos
AU - Lakshminarasimhan, Kaushik
AU - Avila, Eric
AU - Noel, Jean Paul
AU - Pitkow, Xaq
AU - Angelaki, Dora E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Received Nov. 4, 2021; revised Apr. 1, 2022; accepted Apr. 22, 2022. Author contributions: K.L., X.P., and D.E.A. designed research; P.A., K.L., E.A., J.-P.N., and X.P. performed research; P.A. and J.-P.N. analyzed data; P.A. and D.E.A. wrote the paper. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health Brain Initiative Grants 1U19-NS118246 and 1R01 DC014678), NeuroNex Award DBI-1707398, and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. We thank Jing Lin and Jian Chen for technical support and Baptiste Caziot and Akis Stavropoulos for insights. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Correspondence should be addressed to Panos Alefantis at pa77@nyu.edu. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2203-21.2022 Copyright © 2022 Alefantis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Society for Neuroscience. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/7/6
Y1 - 2022/7/6
N2 - Sensory evidence accumulation is considered a hallmark of decision-making in noisy environments. Integration of sensory inputs has been traditionally studied using passive stimuli, segregating perception from action. Lessons learned from this approach, however, may not generalize to ethological behaviors like navigation, where there is an active interplay between perception and action. We designed a sensory-based sequential decision task in virtual reality in which humans and monkeys navigated to a memorized location by integrating optic flow generated by their own joystick movements. A major challenge in such closed-loop tasks is that subjects’ actions will determine future sensory input, causing ambiguity about whether they rely on sensory input rather than expectations based solely on a learned model of the dynamics. To test whether subjects integrated optic flow over time, we used three independent experimental manipulations, unpredictable optic flow perturbations, which pushed subjects off their trajectory; gain manipulation of the joystick controller, which changed the consequences of actions; and manipulation of the optic flow density, which changed the information borne by sensory evidence. Our results suggest that both macaques (male) and humans (female/male) relied heavily on optic flow, thereby demonstrating a critical role for sensory evidence accumulation during naturalistic action-perception closed-loop tasks.
AB - Sensory evidence accumulation is considered a hallmark of decision-making in noisy environments. Integration of sensory inputs has been traditionally studied using passive stimuli, segregating perception from action. Lessons learned from this approach, however, may not generalize to ethological behaviors like navigation, where there is an active interplay between perception and action. We designed a sensory-based sequential decision task in virtual reality in which humans and monkeys navigated to a memorized location by integrating optic flow generated by their own joystick movements. A major challenge in such closed-loop tasks is that subjects’ actions will determine future sensory input, causing ambiguity about whether they rely on sensory input rather than expectations based solely on a learned model of the dynamics. To test whether subjects integrated optic flow over time, we used three independent experimental manipulations, unpredictable optic flow perturbations, which pushed subjects off their trajectory; gain manipulation of the joystick controller, which changed the consequences of actions; and manipulation of the optic flow density, which changed the information borne by sensory evidence. Our results suggest that both macaques (male) and humans (female/male) relied heavily on optic flow, thereby demonstrating a critical role for sensory evidence accumulation during naturalistic action-perception closed-loop tasks.
KW - closed loop
KW - naturalistic
KW - navigation
KW - nonhuman primates
KW - sensory accumulation
KW - virtual reality
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U2 - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2203-21.2022
DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2203-21.2022
M3 - Article
C2 - 35641186
AN - SCOPUS:85134251369
VL - 42
SP - 5451
EP - 5462
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Neuroscience
SN - 0270-6474
IS - 27
ER -