The effect of reward expectation on the time course of perceptual decisions
Perceptual discriminations can be strongly biased by the expected reward for a correct decision but the neural mechanisms underlying this influence are still partially unclear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a task requiring to arbitrarily associate a visual stimulus with a specific action, we have recently shown that perceptual decisions are encoded within the same sensorimotor regions responsible for planning and executing specific motor actions. Here we examined whether these regions additionally encode the amount of expected reward for a perceptual decision.