Coordinated cross-brain activity during accumulation of sensory evidence and decision commitment

Cognition is produced by the continuous interactions between many regions across the brain, but has typically been studied one brain region at a time. How signals in different regions coordinate to achieve a single coherent action remains unclear. Here, we address this question by characterizing the simultaneous interactions between up to 20 brain regions across the brain (10 targeted regions per hemisphere), of rats performing the “Poisson Clicks” task, a decision-making task that demands the gradual accumulation of momentary evidence. Using 8 Neuropixels probes in each animal, we recorded simultaneously in prefrontal cortex, striatum, motor cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and thalamus. To assess decision-related interactions between regions, we quantified correlations of each region’s “decision variable”: moment-to-moment co-fluctuations along the axis in neural state space that best predicts the upcoming choice. This revealed a network of strongly correlated brain regions that include the dorsomedial frontal cortex (dmFC), anterior dorsal striatum (ADS), and primary motor cortex (M1), whose decision variables also led the rest of the brain. If coordinated activity within this subnetwork reflects an ongoing evidence accumulation process, these correlations should cease at the time of decision commitment. We therefore compared correlations before versus after “nTc”, a recently reported estimator for the time of internal decision commitment. We found that correlations in the decision variables between different brain regions decayed to near-zero after nTc. Additionally, we found that choice-predictive activity steadily increased over time before nTc, but abruptly stopped growing at nTc, consistent with an evidence accumulation process that has stopped evolving at that time. Assessing nTc from the activity of individual regions revealed that nTc could be reliably detected earlier in M1 than other regions. These results show that evidence accumulation involves coordination within a network of frontal cortical and striatal regions, and suggests that termination of this process may initiate in M1.