There have been no published inactivation experiments in primate PPC or FEF during accumulation of evidence tasks.
If the PPC plays a causal role in internally-guided decisions, but does not play a causal role in choice behavior during accumulation of evidence tasks, what role is then played by the firing rate correlates of evidence accumulation signals observed in PPC, in both rats and primates?
Using in vivo cellular resolution imaging in voluntarily head-restrained rats, we examined the responses of neurons in frontal and parietal cortices during a pulse-based accumulation of evidence task.
There has been one perturbation study in the primate FEF during an accumulation of evidence task (Gold and Shadlen, 2000).
There has been one perturbation study in the primate PPC during an accumulation of evidence task (Hanks et al., 2006).
Thank you for sending your work entitled "Distinct effects of prefrontal and parietal cortex inactivations on an accumulation of evidence task in the rat" for consideration at eLife.
Critically, the model-based analyses suggested a specific location for the FOF within the functional process chain required by our accumulation of evidence task.
We agree that the bulk of our data, from an auditory accumulation of evidence task, provides evidence only about accumulation of auditory evidence, and that we should correct our writing wherever it gives a misleading impression.
This contrasts with a preliminary report from Yates et al. that suggested no effect from primate PPC inactivation in a visual accumulation of evidence task (Yates et al., 2014), as well as with multiple reports of no effect from primate PPC inactivation in visual memory-guided saccade tasks (Chafee and Goldman-Rakic, 2000; Wardak et al., 2002; Liu et al., 2010; Wilke et al., 2012).
Comparative methodology is presented as an accumulation of almost undoable tasks (Lomio, Spang-Hanssen, & Wilson, 2011, p. 36).
