Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston, United States
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, United States
David McCormick
Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States; Department of Neuroscience, Yale University, New Haven, United States
Matthew J McGinley
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston, United States; Department of Neuroscience, Yale University, New Haven, United States
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Decisions are often made by accumulating ambiguous evidence over time. The brain’s arousal systems are activated during such decisions. In previous work in humans, we found that evoked responses of arousal systems during decisions are reported by rapid dilations of the pupil and track a suppression of biases in the accumulation of decision-relevant evidence (de Gee et al., 2017). Here, we show that this arousal-related suppression in decision bias acts on both conservative and liberal biases, and generalizes from humans to mice, and from perceptual to memory-based decisions. In challenging sound-detection tasks, the impact of spontaneous or experimentally induced choice biases was reduced under high phasic arousal. Similar bias suppression occurred when evidence was drawn from memory. All of these behavioral effects were explained by reduced evidence accumulation biases. Our results point to a general principle of interplay between phasic arousal and decision-making.
