Interplay between components of pupil-linked phasic arousal and its role in driving behavioral choice in Go/No-Go perceptual decision-making

In decision-making tasks, neural circuits involved in different aspects of information processing may activate the central arousal system, likely through their interconnection with brainstem arousal nuclei, collectively contributing to the observed pupil-linked phasic arousal. However, the individual components of the phasic arousal associated with different elements of information processing and their effects on behavior remain little known. In this study, we used machine learning techniques to decompose pupil-linked phasic arousal evoked by different components of information processing in rats performing a Go/No-Go perceptual decision-making task. We found that phasic arousal evoked by stimulus encoding was larger for the Go stimulus than the No-Go stimulus. For each session, the separation between distributions of phasic arousal evoked by the Go and by the No-Go stimulus was predictive of perceptual performance. The separation between distributions of decision-formation-evoked arousal on correct and incorrect trials was correlated with decision criterion but not perceptual performance. When a Go stimulus was presented, the action of go was primarily determined by the phasic arousal evoked by stimulus encoding. On the contrary, when a No-Go stimulus was presented, the action of go was determined by phasic arousal elicited by both stimulus encoding and decision formation. Drift diffusion modeling revealed that the four model parameters were better accounted for when phasic arousal elicited by both stimulus encoding and decision formation was considered. These results suggest that the interplay between phasic arousal evoked by both stimulus encoding and decision formation has important functional consequences on forming behavioral choice in perceptual decision-making.