Dissociable encoding of evolving beliefs and momentary belief updates in distinct neural decision signals

Elisabet Parés-Pujolràs (), Simon P. Kelly and Peter R. Murphy
Additional contact information
Elisabet Parés-Pujolràs: University College Dublin
Simon P. Kelly: University College Dublin
Peter R. Murphy: Maynooth University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Making accurate decisions in noisy environments requires integrating evidence over time. Studies of simple perceptual decisions in static environments have identified two human neurophysiological signals that evolve with similar integration dynamics, with one - the centroparietal positivity - appearing to compute the running integral and continuously feed it to the other - motor beta lateralisation. However, it remains unknown whether and how these signals serve more distinct functional roles in more complex scenarios. Here, we use a volatile expanded judgement task that dissociates raw sensory information, belief updates, and the evolving belief itself. We find that motor beta lateralisation traces the evolving belief across stimuli, while the centroparietal positivity locally encodes the belief updates associated with each individual stimulus. These results suggest a flexible computational hierarchy where context-dependent belief updates can be computed sample-by-sample at an intermediate processing level to modify downstream belief representations for protracted decisions about discrete stimuli.

Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58861-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-58861-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58861-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().