Mechanisms of perceptual decision-making in the premotor cortex

Making decisions is an essential part of life. For example, deciding whether to go for a run in England requires us to infer whether it has stopped raining or if it has just stopped in a temporary lull. We integrate external information about the current state of the weather with prior knowledge about the frequent rainfall in England before committing to an action. 

We will investigate how different parts of the brain contribute to deciding how and when to act. We will focus on how activity in a key decision-making area in the frontal neocortex contributes to animals' choices, using a new task designed to investigate mice's decision-making. We can use mice to pinpoint which types of cells and pathways in the brain are involved, by recording and manipulating their activity at specific times during the decision process. 

Determining how brain circuits compute decisions is fundamental for understanding how animals make appropriate and inappropriate judgements and may inform the development of intelligent artificial agents.