The salience network dynamics in perceptual decision-making

Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the network consisting of the right anterior insula (rAI), left anterior insula (lAI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is activated in sensory stimulus-guided goal-directed behaviors. This network is often known as the salience network (SN). When and how a sensory signal enters and organizes within SN before reaching the central executive network including the prefrontal cortices is still a mystery. Previous electrophysiological studies focused on individual nodes of SN, either on dACC or rAI, have reports of conflicting findings of the earliest cortical activity within the network. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are not able to answer these questions in the time-scales of human sensory perception and decision-making. Here, using clear and noisy face-house image categorization tasks and human scalp electroencephalography (EEG) recordings combined with source reconstruction techniques, we study when and how oscillatory activity organizes SN during a perceptual decision. We uncovered that the beta-band (13-30 Hz) oscillations bound SN, became most active around 100 ms after the stimulus onset and the rAI acted as a main outflow hub within SN for easier decision making task. The SN activities (Granger causality measures) were negatively correlated with the decision response time (decision difficulty). These findings suggest that the SN activity precedes the executive control in mediating sensory and cognitive processing to arrive at visual perceptual decisions.