Stochastic resonance enhances the rate of evidence accumulation during combined brain stimulation and perceptual decision-making

PLoS Comput Biol. 2018 Jul 18;14(7):e1006301. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006301. eCollection 2018 Jul.

Abstract

Perceptual decision-making relies on the gradual accumulation of noisy sensory evidence. It is often assumed that such decisions are degraded by adding noise to a stimulus, or to the neural systems involved in the decision making process itself. But it has been suggested that adding an optimal amount of noise can, under appropriate conditions, enhance the quality of subthreshold signals in nonlinear systems, a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance. Here we asked whether perceptual decisions made by human observers obey these stochastic resonance principles, by adding noise directly to the visual cortex using transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) while participants judged the direction of coherent motion in random-dot kinematograms presented at the fovea. We found that adding tRNS bilaterally to visual cortex enhanced decision-making when stimuli were just below perceptual threshold, but not when they were well below or above threshold. We modelled the data under a drift diffusion framework, and showed that bilateral tRNS selectively increased the drift rate parameter, which indexes the rate of evidence accumulation. Our study is the first to provide causal evidence that perceptual decision-making is susceptible to a stochastic resonance effect induced by tRNS, and to show that this effect arises from selective enhancement of the rate of evidence accumulation for sub-threshold sensory events.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Computer Simulation
  • Decision Making*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Models, Neurological*
  • Motion Perception
  • Noise*
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Visual Cortex / physiology*
  • Visual Perception / physiology*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

OvdG was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 165189 and 320030_149561), NW was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 320030_149561), and MFT and JBM were supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function (ARC Centre Grant CE140100007). JBM was supported by an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship (FL110100103). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.