Section Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Berlin, Germany; Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Berlin, Germany
Section Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Decisions under uncertainty are often biased by the history of preceding sensory input, behavioral choices, or received outcomes. Behavioral studies of perceptual decisions suggest that such history-dependent biases affect the accumulation of evidence and can be adapted to the correlation structure of the sensory environment. Here, we systematically varied this correlation structure while human participants performed a canonical perceptual choice task. We tracked the trial-by-trial variations of history biases via behavioral modeling and of a neural signature of decision formation via magnetoencephalography (MEG). The history bias was flexibly adapted to the environment and exerted a selective effect on the build-up (not baseline level) of action-selective motor cortical activity during decision formation. This effect added to the impact of the current stimulus. We conclude that the build-up of action plans in human motor cortical circuits is shaped by dynamic prior expectations that result from an adaptive interaction with the environment.
