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Sketchpad Series

Investigating Domain-General Neural Mechanisms of Decision Making Across Perception and Memory

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alice Tsvinev¹ (atsvinev@ucsc.edu), Jason Samaha¹; ¹UC Santa Cruz

Humans frequently make decisions based on either sensory evidence from our external environment, or by accessing information held in memory. Numerous studies have identified an event-related EEG potential called the centro-parietal positivity (CPP) as a neural indicator of abstract sensory evidence accumulation in perceptual decision making tasks. However, little research has explored whether the same CPP component reflects an evidence accumulation process that also generalizes to decisions based on long-term memory retrieval. The present study aims to examine whether the CPP behaves as a neural signal of evidence accumulation across both perceptual and semantic-memory based decisions in order to better understand whether a single-domain general mechanism accumulates evidence for our decisions, regardless of the evidence source. The perceptual task requires participants to discriminate the luminance difference between two strings of alpha-numeric characters across three difficulty levels. The memory task requires participants to discriminate the population difference between two US states, chosen based on census data to come from three difficulty levels. Participants will be asked to respond to the stimuli presented on screen indicating either the brighter letter string or higher state population. Consistent with previous research, this study aims to identify a CPP-like component within the memory task that is responsive to task difficulty level, RT, and accuracy, extending electrophysiological findings in decision making into the domain of memory. The findings from this study will inform the question of whether the computations guiding our decisions are domain-general processes, reflecting similar evidence accumulation patterns across different types of decisions.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making