Tobias H Donner

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at University Medical Center Hamburg - Eppendorf

Changes in central arousal state shape cortical computations underlying perception, thought, and action. Variations in arousal are accompanied by fluctuations in pupil size. In turn, pupil dynamics are often used as a marker of noradrenaline release from neurons of the locus coeruleus. The serotonergic system of the dorsal raphe also contributes to...

The arousal systems of the brainstem, specifically the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system, respond “phasically” during decisions. These central arousal transients are accompanied by dilations of the pupil. Mechanistic attempts to understand the impact of phasic arousal on cognition would benefit from temporally precise experimental manipulations....

Theoretical accounts postulate that the catecholaminergic neuromodulator noradrenaline shapes cognitive behavior by reducing the impact of prior expectations on learning, inference, and decision-making. A ubiquitous effect of dynamic priors on perceptual decisions under uncertainty is choice history bias: the tendency to systematically repeat, or a...

Many decisions entail the updating of beliefs about the state of the environment by accumulating noisy sensory evidence. This form of probabilistic reasoning may go awry in psychosis. Computational theory shows that optimal belief updating in environments subject to hidden changes in their state requires a dynamic modulation of the evidence accumul...

Temporal integration of sensory information is an important aspect in many perceptual decision tasks. Our prior study found that a temporal break in the middle of an otherwise regular sequence of stimulus samples resulted in an increased weighting of the first post-break sample when performing a subsequent perceptual judgment. To further probe the...

Psychotic disorders present a challenge for research and clinical practice. Their pathogenesis is poorly understood, symptoms vary widely between patients, and there is a lack of objective biomarkers. Evidence points to a distributed nature of the underlying synaptic alterations in the cerebral cortex. Using magnetoencephalography source imaging, w...

Decision-makers often process new evidence selectively, depending on their current beliefs about the world. We asked whether such confirmation biases result from biases in the encoding of sensory evidence in the brain, or alternatively in the utilization of encoded evidence for behavior. Human participants estimated the source of a sequence of visu...

Aging is accompanied by a decline of working memory, an important cognitive capacity that involves stimulus-selective neural activity that persists after stimulus presentation. Here, we unraveled working memory dynamics in older human adults (male and female) including those diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using a combination of beha...

The arousal systems of the brainstem, specifically the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system, respond “phasically” during decisions. These central arousal transients are accompanied by dilations of the pupil. Mechanistic attempts to understand the impact of phasic arousal on cognition would benefit from the ability to experimentally manipulate arous...

The 40 Hz auditory steady-state response (ASSR), an oscillatory brain response to periodically modulated auditory stimuli, is a promising, noninvasive physiological biomarker for schizophrenia and related neuropsychiatric disorders. The 40 Hz ASSR might be amplified by synaptic interactions in cortical circuits, which are, in turn, disturbed in neu...

Many decisions entail the updating of beliefs about the state of the environment, a process that may go awry in psychosis. When environments are subject to hidden changes in their state, optimal belief updating requires non-linear modulation of sensory evidence, which may be subserved by pupil-linked, phasic arousal. Here, we analyzed behavior and...

Many cognitive tasks require a flexible mapping from specific features of sensory input to motor output. Such flexible input-output mapping is reflected in intrinsic correlated variability of activity within the cortical network that implements the decision process, and might rely on rapid plasticity mechanisms that are under neuromodulatory contro...

Decisions under uncertainty are often biased by the history of preceding sensory input, behavioral choices, or received outcomes. Behavioral studies of perceptual decisions suggest that such history-dependent biases affect the accumulation of evidence and can be adapted to the correlation structure of the sensory environment. Here, we systematicall...

Detection of deviant stimuli is crucial to orient and adapt our behavior. Previous work shows that deviant stimuli elicit phasic activation of the locus coeruleus (LC), which releases noradrenaline and controls central arousal. However, it is unclear whether the detection of behaviorally relevant deviant stimuli selectively triggers LC responses or...

The 40 Hz auditory steady-state response (ASSR), an oscillatory brain response to periodically modulated auditory stimuli, is a promising, non-invasive physiological biomarker for schizophrenia and related neuropsychiatric disorders. The 40 Hz ASSR might be amplified by synaptic interactions in cortical circuits, which are, in turn, disturbed in ne...

Aging is accompanied by a decline of multiple cognitive capacities, including working memory: the ability to maintain information online for the flexible control of behavior. Working memory involves stimulus-selective neural activity, persisting after stimulus presentation in widely distributed cortical areas. Here, we unraveled the mechanisms of w...

Quantifying the amount, content and direction of communication between brain regions is key to understanding brain function. Traditional methods to analyze brain activity based on the Wiener- Granger causality principle quantify the overall information propagated by neural activity between simultaneously recorded brain regions, but do not reveal th...

Humans and non-human primates can flexibly switch between different arbitrary mappings from sensation to action to solve a cognitive task. It has remained unknown how the brain implements such flexible sensory-motor mapping rules. Here, we uncovered a dynamic reconfiguration of task-specific correlated variability between sensory and motor brain re...

Decisions under uncertainty are often biased by the history of preceding sensory input, behavioral choices, or received outcomes. Behavioral studies of perceptual decisions suggest that such history-dependent biases affect the accumulation of evidence within trials and can be adapted to the correlation structure of the sensory environment. Here, we...

Humans and other animals tend to repeat or alternate their previous choices, even when judging sensory stimuli presented in a random sequence. It is unclear if and how sensory, associative, and motor cortical circuits produce these idiosyncratic behavioral biases. Here, we combined behavioral modeling of a visual perceptual decision with magnetoenc...

A bstract Recent work indicates that pupil-linked phasic arousal signals reduce the impact of prior expectations and biases on decision formation. It has remained unclear whether phasic arousal (i) causes the bias reduction, if (ii) choosing against one’s bias causes phasic arousal, or if (iii) a third variable is driving both. Here, using an audit...

Humans and non-human primates can acquire, and rapidly switch between, arbitrary rules that govern the mapping from sensation to action. It has remained unknown if and how the brain configures large-scale sensory-motor circuits to establish such flexible information flow. Here, we developed an approach that elucidates the dynamic configuration of t...

Fluctuations in arousal, controlled by subcortical neuromodulatory systems, continuously shape cortical state, with profound consequences for information processing. Yet, how arousal signals influence cortical population activity in detail has so far only been characterized for a few selected brain regions. Traditional accounts conceptualize arousa...

While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at ultra‐high field (7 T) promises a general increase in sensitivity compared to lower field strengths, the benefits may be most pronounced for specific applications. The current study aimed to evaluate the relative benefit of 7 over 3 T fMRI for the assessment of responses evoked in different brai...

A bstract Humans and other animals tend to systematically repeat (or alternate) their previous choices, even when judging sensory stimuli presented in a random sequence. Choice history biases may arise from action preparation in motor circuits, or from perceptual or decision processing in upstream areas. Here, we combined source-level magnetoenceph...

Many decisions under uncertainty entail the temporal accumulation of evidence that informs about the state of the environment. When environments are subject to hidden changes in their state, maximizing accuracy and reward requires non-linear accumulation of evidence. How this adaptive, non-linear computation is realized in the brain is unknown. We...

Fluctuations in arousal, controlled by subcortical neuromodulatory systems, continuously shape cortical state, with profound consequences for information processing. Yet, how arousal signals influence cortical population activity in detail has only been characterized for a few selected brain regions so far. Traditional accounts conceptualize arousa...

Central to human and animal cognition is the ability to learn from feedback in order to optimize future rewards. Such a learning signal might be encoded and broadcasted by the brain's arousal systems, including the noradrenergic locus coeruleus. Pupil responses and the positive slow wave component of event-related potentials reflect rapid changes i...

Our judgments of our environment are often shaped by heuristics and prior experience. New research shows that the resulting biases are encoded, and combined with new sensory input, by groups of neurons in the frontal cortex during decisions under uncertainty.

Human observers can reliably report their confidence in the choices they make. An influential framework conceptualizes decision confidence as the probability of a decision being correct, given the choice made and the evidence on which it was based. This framework accounts for three diagnostic signatures of human confidence reports, including an opp...

Perceptual decisions entail the accumulation of sensory evidence for a particular choice towards an action plan. An influential framework holds that sensory cortical areas encode the instantaneous sensory evidence and downstream, action-related regions accumulate this evidence. The large-scale distribution of this computation across the cerebral co...

Influential accounts postulate distinct roles of the catecholamine and acetylcholine neuromodulatory systems in cognition and behavior. But previous work found similar effects of these modulators on the response properties of individual cortical neurons. Here, we report a double dissociation between catecholamine and acetylcholine effects at the le...

Central to human and animal cognition is the ability to learn from feedback in order to optimize future rewards. Such a learning signal might be encoded and broadcasted by the brain's arousal systems, including the noradrenergic locus coeruleus. Pupil responses and the P3 component of event-related potentials reflect rapid changes in the arousal le...

Decisions are often made by accumulating ambiguous evidence over time. The brain’s arousal systems are activated during such decisions. In previous work in humans, we found that evoked responses of arousal systems during decisions are reported by rapid dilations of the pupil and track a suppression of biases in the accumulation of decision-relevant...

Decisions are often made by accumulating ambiguous evidence over time. The brain’s arousal systems are activated during such decisions. In previous work in humans, we found that evoked responses of arousal systems during decisions are reported by rapid dilations of the pupil and track a suppression of biases in the accumulation of decision-relevant...

Decisions are often made by accumulating ambiguous evidence over time. The brain’s arousal systems are activated during such decisions. In previous work in humans, we found that evoked responses of arousal systems during decisions are reported by rapid dilations of the pupil and track a suppression of biases in the accumulation of decision-relevant...

Significant progress has been made in ultra-high field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 7 Tesla (T). While fMRI at 7 T promises a general increase in sensitivity compared to lower field strengths, the benefits may be most pronounced for specific applications. The current study aimed to evaluate the relative benefit of 7 T over 3 T fM...

Learning from past successes and failures improves decisions to produce appropriate actions in each perceived situation. However, reinforcement learning is not thought to be engaged during well-trained perceptual decision tasks, —after task acquisition is complete and performance is stable—, since choice accuracy is limited by perception. We report...

Learning from successes and failures often improves the quality of subsequent decisions. Past outcomes, however, should not influence purely perceptual decisions after task acquisition is complete since these are designed so that only sensory evidence determines the correct choice. Yet, numerous studies report that outcomes can bias perceptual deci...

Learning from successes and failures often improves the quality of subsequent decisions. Past outcomes, however, should not influence purely perceptual decisions after task acquisition is complete since these are designed so that only sensory evidence determines the correct choice. Yet, numerous studies report that outcomes can bias perceptual deci...

Working memory (WM) refers to the temporary retention and manipulation of information, and its capacity is highly susceptible to training. Yet, the neural mechanisms that allow for increased performance under demanding conditions are not fully understood. We expected that post-training efficiency in WM performance modulates neural processing during...

Decisions do not occur in isolation, but are embedded in sequences of other decisions, often pertaining to the same source of evidence. Here, we characterized the impact of intermittent choices on the accumulation of a protracted stream of decision-relevant evidence towards a final decision. Human participants performed two versions, based on perce...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Human observers can reliably report their confidence in the choices they make. An influential framework conceptualizes decision confidence as the probability of a decision being correct, given the choice made and the evidence on which it was based. This framework accounts for three diagnostic signatures of human confidence reports, including an opp...

Decision-making under uncertainty commonly entails the accumulation of decision-relevant 'evidence' over time. In natural environments, this accumulation process is complicated by the existence of hidden changes in the state of the environment. Optimal behavior in such contexts requires a rapid, non-linear tuning of the evidence accumulation. The n...

Neural activity fluctuates over time, creating considerable variability across trials. This trial-by-trial neural variability is dramatically reduced (“quenched”) after the presentation of sensory stimuli. Likewise, the power of neural oscillations, primarily in the alpha-beta band, is also reduced after stimulus onset. Despite their similarity, th...

Brain activity fluctuates continuously, even in the absence of changes in sensory input or motor output. These intrinsic activity fluctuations are correlated across brain regions and are spatially organized in macroscale networks. Variations in the strength, topography, and topology of correlated activity occur over time, and unfold upon a backbone...

When external feedback about decision outcomes is lacking, agents need to adapt their decision policies based on an internal estimate of the correctness of their choices (i.e., decision confidence). We hypothesized that agents use confidence to continuously update the tradeoff between the speed and accuracy of their decisions: When confidence is lo...

Brain activity fluctuates continuously, even in the absence of changes in sensory input or motor output. These intrinsic activity fluctuations are correlated across brain regions and are spatially organized in macroscale networks. Variations in the strength, topography, and topology of correlated activity occur over time, and unfold upon a backbone...

Perceptual choices depend not only on the current sensory input but also on the behavioral context, such as the history of one’s own choices. Yet, it remains unknown how such history signals shape the dynamics of later decision formation. In models of decision formation, it is commonly assumed that choice history shifts the starting point of accumu...

Spiking activity exhibits a large degree of variability across identical trials, which has been shown to be significantly reduced by stimulus onset in a wide range of cortical areas. Whether similar dynamics apply to the thalamus and in particular to the pulvinar is largely unknown. Here, we examined electrophysiological recordings from two adult r...

Humans like to think of their judgments as ‘rational’, solely based on objective information. Instead, we have found that people interpret decision-relevant information in a way that is distorted by their previous judgments. This mechanism can account for many important real-life biases, and it may be a natural consequence of the architecture of th...

A bstract Perceptual choices depend not only on the current sensory input, but also on the behavioral context. An important contextual factor is the history of one’s own choices. Choice history often strongly biases perceptual decisions, and leaves traces in the activity of brain regions involved in decision processing. Yet, it remains unknown how...

Neural activity fluctuates over time, creating considerable variability across trials. This trial-by-trial neural variability is dramatically reduced ("quenched") after the presentation of sensory stimuli. Likewise, the power of neural oscillations, primarily in the alpha-beta band, is also reduced. Despite their similarity, these phenomena have be...

In the absence of external feedback about decision outcomes, agents need to adapt their decision policies based on their internal evaluation of their own performance (i.e., decision confidence). We hypothesized that agents use decision confidence to continuously update the tradeoff between the speed and the accuracy of their decisions: When confide...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Neuromodulatory brainstem systems controlling the global arousal state of the brain are phasically recruited during cognitive tasks. The function of such task-evoked neuromodulatory signals is debated. Here, we uncovered a general principle of their function, across species and behavioral tasks: counteracting maladaptive biases in the accumulation...

Perceptual decisions about the state of the environment are often made in the face of uncertain evidence. Internal uncertainty signals are considered important regulators of learning and decision-making. A growing body of work has implicated the brain's arousal systems in uncertainty signaling. Here, we found that two specific computational variabl...

People's assessments of the state of the world often deviate systematically from the information available to them [1]. Such biases can originate from people's own decisions: committing to a categorical proposition, or a course of action, biases subsequent judgment and decision-making. This phenomenon, called confirmation bias [2], has been explain...

The widely projecting catecholaminergic (norepinephrine and dopamine) neurotransmitter systems profoundly shape the state of neuronal networks in the forebrain. Current models posit that the effects of catecholaminergic modulation on network dynamics are homogeneous across the brain. However, the brain is equipped with a variety of catecholamine re...

Learning the statistical structure of the environment is crucial for adaptive behavior. Humans and nonhuman decision-makers seem to track such structure through a process of probabilistic inference, which enables predictions about behaviorally relevant events. Deviations from such predictions cause surprise, which in turn helps improve inference. S...

Learning the statistical structure of the environment is crucial for adaptive behavior. Humans and non-human decision-makers seem to track such structure through a process of probabilistic inference, which enables predictions about behaviorally relevant events. Deviations from such predictions cause surprise, which in turn helps improve inference....

At any time, we are processing thousands of stimuli, but only few of them will be remembered hours or days later. Is there any way to predict which ones? Here, we tested whether the pupil response to ongoing stimuli, an indicator of physiological arousal known to be relevant for memory formation, is a reliable predictor of long‐term memory for thes...

At any time, we are processing thousands of stimuli, but only few of them will be remembered hours or days later. Is there any way to predict which ones? Here, we show that the pupil response to ongoing stimuli, an indicator of physiological arousal, is a reliable predictor of long-term memory for these stimuli, over at least one day. Pupil dilatio...

The ascending modulatory systems of the brain stem are powerful regulators of global brain state. Disturbances of these systems are implicated in several major neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet, how these systems interact with specific neural computations in the cerebral cortex to shape perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. H...

No donepezil-related changes in scaling exponent in either behavioral contexts. (A) Spatial distribution of Donepezil-induced changes in scaling exponent α during Fixation, thresholded at p = 0.05 (two-sided cluster-based permutation test). (B) As (A), but for Task-counting. The data can be found at https://figshare.com/articles/DFA_source_level_/5...

Movie file of the structure-from-motion ambiguous visual stimulus used in this study. (MP4)

Similar atomoxetine-related effects in both Task-counting and Task-pressing conditions. (A) Number of perceptual alternations reported by the subjects per 10-min run for the Task-counting condition. (B) Same as (A), but for Task-pressing condition. (C) Relation between the number of reported alternations during Task-counting (x-axis) and Task-press...

Power spectra averaged across all MEG sensors during Fixation (A) and Task-counting (B). Black bar denotes significant differences assessed using a paired cluster-based permutation test (p < 0.05). The data can be found at https://figshare.com/s/ccefac78c698061219b5. MEG, magnetoencephalography. (TIF)

Change in perceptual alternation rate is not due to change in blinks or fixational eye movements. (A) Number of EOG events during Task-counting (left), Task-pressing (middle), and pooled across both conditions (right). Scatterplots depict the relation between the number of EOG events (x-axis) and the number of reported perceptual alternations (y-ax...

Direct comparison of the drug effects on scaling exponent α. (A) Comparison of the effects of the two drugs conditions (i.e., Atomoxetine versus Donepezil) during Fixation. (B) Same as (A), but during Task-counting. All thresholds at p = 0.05, cluster-based two-sided permutation tests (N = 28). The data can be found at https://figshare.com/articles...

Different version of modulation of excitation-inhibition ratio in cortical patch model (A). Neuromodulation was simulated as a gain modulation term multiplied with excitatory (EE and IE) and/or inhibitory (EI only) synaptic weights. (B) κ as a function of excitatory and inhibitory connectivity (with a spacing of 2.5%; means across 10 simulations pe...

Sensor-level scaling exponent for the Atomoxetine condition, pooled across Fixation and Task-counting conditions. Thresholded at p = 0.05, two-sided cluster-based permutation test. The data can be found at https://figshare.com/s/34a7070a329772f90df8. (TIF)

Similar effects of atomoxetine and donepezil on low-frequency (2–8 Hz) power. (A) Spatial distribution of drug-related low-frequency power changes during Fixation, thresholded at p = 0.05 (two-sided cluster-based permutation test). Left: Power changes after the administration of atomoxetine. Right: Power changes after the administration of donepezi...

Perceptual decision-making is biased by previous events, including the history of preceding choices: observers tend to repeat (or alternate) their judgments of the sensory environment more often than expected by chance. Computational models postulate that these so-called choice history biases result from the accumulation of internal decision signal...

The ascending modulatory systems of the brainstem are powerful regulators of global brain state. Disturbances of these systems are implicated in several major neuropsychiatric disorders. Yet, how these systems interact with specific neural computations in the cerebral cortex to shape perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. He...

Perceptual decision-making is biased by previous events, including the history of preceding choices: Observers tend to repeat (or alternate) their judgments of the sensory environment more often than expected by chance. Computational models postulate that these so-called choice history biases result from the accumulation of internal decision signal...

The cerebral cortex continuously undergoes changes in its state, which are manifested in transient modulations of the cortical power spectrum. Cortical state changes also occur at full wakefulness and during rapid cognitive acts, such as perceptual decisions. Previous studies found a global modulation of beta-band (12–30 Hz) activity in human and m...

This csv table contains the data for Figure 2 panel D.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23232.008

Table with variable identifiers used in Figure 4—source data 1.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23232.015

This csv table contains the data for Figure 4 panel D.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.23232.016