Perceptual decision making: Biases in post-error reaction times explained by attractor network dynamics

TL;DR

This paper extends an attractor network model to analyze sequential perceptual decisions, revealing how biases and post-error slowing naturally emerge from network dynamics, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces an extended attractor network model that explains sequential decision biases and post-error slowing without feedback, bridging a gap in modeling continuous decision sequences.

Findings

The model reproduces repetition biases in reaction times.

It explains post-error slowing without feedback.

The model aligns quantitatively with behavioral data.

Abstract

Perceptual decision making is the subject of many experimental and theoretical studies. Whereas most modeling analysis are based on statistical processes of accumulation of evidence, less attention is being devoted to the modeling with attractor network dynamics, even though they describe well psychophysical and neurophysiological data. In particular, very few works confront attractor models predictions with data from continuous sequences of trials. Recently however, a biophysical competitive attractor network model has been used to describe such sequences of decision trials, and has been shown to reproduce repetition biases observed in perceptual decision experiments. Here we propose an extension of the reduced attractor network model of Wong and Wang (2006) to get more insights into such effects. We make explicit the conditions under which such network can perform a succession of decisions, and show that the model provides a mathematical framework for studying the effects of a trial on the decision made on the next one. We study in details the reaction times properties during a sequence of decision trials, and show that the model reproduces behavioral data, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In particular, we find that the decision made on the current trial is biased toward the one made on the previous trial. More remarkably, we show that, in the absence of any feedback about the correctness of the decision, the network exhibits post-error slowing, a subtle effect in agreement with empirical data.