Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

A large body of work has identified characteristic neural signatures of value-based decision-making, including dynamic neural activity closely resembling the ramping evidence accumulation process thought to underpin goal-directed choice, e.g., the centroparietal positivity (CPP). However, recent neuroimaging studies suggest that value-based choices trigger multiple value-related neural signatures, some of which are unrelated to decision-making per se but instead reflect reflexive affective reactions to one’s options. Here, we use the temporal resolution of EEG to dissociate choice-independent value signals from well-known temporal signatures of the choice process. We identify distinct spatiotemporal clusters, one stimulus-locked, associated with the affective salience of a choice set, and one response-locked, associated with the difficulty of the choice, neither consistent with evidence accumulation signals. Instead, we find that stimulus-locked activity can mimic an evidence accumulation process when aligned to the response. We then re-analyze two previous studies – one value-based, one perceptual decision-making – that demonstrate an evidence accumulation signal and show that this signal disappears when stimulus-locked and response-locked signals are jointly accounted for. Collectively, our findings show that neural signatures of value can reflect choice-independent processes that when analyzed using standard approaches, can look deceptively like evidence accumulation.