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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Temporal Processing during Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Rikki Rabinovich¹, Daniel Feldman¹, Rhiannon L Cowan¹, T. Alexander Price¹, Niloufar Shahdoust¹, Tyler S Davis¹, Shervin Rahimpour¹, Ben Shofty¹, Elliot H Smith¹; ¹University of Utah

Presenter: Rikki Rabinovich

Time perception and decision-making are interrelated processes critical to much of human and animal behavior, but the neural basis of temporal decision-making is unclear. This study leverages human intracranial electrophysiology to investigate temporal processing during risky decision-making. We apply the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), in which participants try to maximally inflate virtual balloons, stopping before they pop. Decoding features of the task on a trial-by-trial basis, we find neural representations of time during balloon inflation, especially in medial and lateral temporal brain regions. Encoding of time depends on active decisions: we cannot decode time during passive observation of balloon inflation. Finally, we validate these results using a temporal convolution network to predict participants’ response time from brain activity leading up to the response. Together, our findings reveal neural representations that encode time, specifically in relation to an active decision.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition