The Brain's Sequential Parallelism: Perceptual Decision-Making and Early Sensory Responses

Multi-stage decision tasks require the determination of intermediate results in order to perform consecutive decision steps. Electro-physiological recordings in sensory, parietal, and pre-frontal cortical areas have demonstrated that different response characteristics and timings at the neuron level provide key mechanisms to implement characteristic functionalities. We propose a hybrid neural model architecture that accounts for such findings and quantitatively reproduces the timing of such responses. We demonstrate by numerical simulations how the model accounts for feature-dependent decisions and how these are sequentialized during mutual interactions of pools of neurons in different cortical areas. Feedback from higher-level areas to early sensory stages of processing establishes a link between mechanisms involved in response integration and target selection to representations of sensory input.