A Movement-Independent Signature of Urgency During Human Perceptual Decision Making

Abstract

How does the brain adjust its decision processes to ensure timely decision completion? Computational modelling and electrophysiological investigations have pointed to dynamic urgency processes that serve to progressively reduce the quantity of evidence required to reach choice commitment as time elapses. To date, such urgency dynamics have been observed exclusively in neural signals that accumulate evidence for a specific motor plan. Across three complementary experiments, we show that a classic ERP component, the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), also traces dynamic urgency but exhibits unique properties not observed in effector-selective signals. Firstly, it provides a representation of urgency alone, growing only as a function of time and not evidence strength. Secondly, when choice reports must be withheld until a response cue, the CNV peaks and decays long before response execution, mirroring the early termination dynamics of a motor-independent evidence accumulation signal. These properties suggest that the brain may use urgency signals not only to expedite motor planning but also to hasten cognitive deliberation. These data demonstrate that urgency processes operate in a variety of perceptual choice scenarios and that they can be monitored in a model-independent manner via non-invasive brain signals. Significance StatementComputational models suggest that, when decisions are time-constrained the brain progressively lowers the amount of evidence it requires to reach choice commitment, thus increasingly sacrificing accuracy for timely decision completion. To date, neurophysiological investigations have identified signatures of these urgency effects exclusively in areas of the brain that plan the decision-reporting actions. Here, we characterise a human electroencephalogram signature of urgency that exhibits several novel properties: it traces the urgency component of the decision and terminates upon choice commitment even when the decision-reporting action is deferred until later. These observations suggest that urgency can serve to hasten the deliberation process and not just the movements that a decision entails.