No abstract

Discrimination and integration of motion direction requires the interplay of multiple brain areas. Theoretical accounts of perception suggest that stimulus-related (i.e., exogenous) and decision-related (i.e., endogenous) factors affect distributed neuronal processing at different levels of the visual hierarchy. To test these predictions, we measured brain activity of healthy participants during a motion discrimination task, using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We independently modeled the impact of exogenous factors (task demand) and endogenous factors (perceptual decision-making) on the activity of the motion discrimination network and applied Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) to both modalities. DCM for event-related potentials (DCM-ERP) revealed that task demand impacted the reciprocal connections between the primary visual cortex (V1) and medial temporal areas (V5). With practice, higher visual areas were increasingly involved, as revealed by DCM-fMRI. Perceptual decision-making modulated higher levels (e.g., V5-to-Frontal Eye Fields, FEF), in a manner predictive of performance. Our data suggest that lower levels of the visual network support early, feature-based selection of responses, especially when learning strategies have not been implemented. In contrast, perceptual decision-making operates at higher levels of the visual hierarchy by integrating sensory information with the internal state of the subject.