Parés-Pujolràs, Elisabet, Kelly, Simon P. and Murphy, Peter R. (2025) Dissociable encoding of evolving beliefs and momentary belief updates in distinct neural decision signals. Nature Communications, 16 (1). ISSN 2041-1723
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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.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Dissociable encoding; evolving beliefs; momentary belief updates; distinct neural decision signals; |
| Academic Unit: | Faculty of Science and Engineering > Psychology |
| Item ID: | 21417 |
| Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41467-025-58861-9 |
| Depositing User: | Dr Peter Murphy |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Apr 2026 13:41 |
| Journal or Publication Title: | Nature Communications |
| Publisher: | Nature Publshing Group |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Related URLs: | |
| Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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