human brain

Perceptual decision making is the process by which information gathered from sensory sys-tems is combined and used to influence our behavior. In recent years, the fields of systems and cognitive neuroscience have aggressively sought to examine the neural correlates of this process. As a result, significant contributions in the area of perceptual decision making have emerged. In this chapter we briefly review the major contributions made to this area by monkey neurophysiology and discuss how these animal experiments have inspired scientists to study the neural correlates of perceptual decision making in humans using non-invasive methods such as fMRI, EEG, and MEG. We present findings primarily from the visual and somatosensory domains, which we use as supporting evidence in proposing a new theoretical model of perceptual decision making. The latter part of the chapter focuses on how to best integrate EEG with fMRI to achieve both high spatial and high temporal resolution to help inform theories of the neurobiology of perceptual decision making. We conclude by provid-ing a motivation on how this framework for perceptual decision making in combination with the techniques presented here can be extended to study the interaction of sensory and rewar