Biology subjects

Gopnarayan, M. N.

Publications and source records attributed to Gopnarayan, M. N..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Humans integrate gaze and decision cues for inferring preferences in social interactions

Social decision-making depends on inferring others hidden preferences from observable behavior. Yet it remains unclear how humans combine choices with process cues such as response times and gaze when learning about others in real-time interaction. Here we combine a novel multi-attribute bargaining task with eye-tracking and show that multiple decision-process cues support preference inference. Across 75 buyer-seller dyads, buyers acceptance rates tracked offer utility, rejection speed reflected decision confidence, and first fixations preferentially targeted the highest-weighted attribute. Sellers adapted subsequent offers using choices, response times, and, when available, gaze cues. A hierarchical inference and choice model suggested that sellers balanced expected utility with expected information gain and updated their beliefs in a Bayesian manner. Although gaze access did not improve overall performance, it changed how sellers used attentional information. These findings shed light on how humans infer others hidden preferences from decision dynamics in real-time social interaction.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Attenuation of value-to-evidence translation drives biased decision making in anxiety and depression

Anxiety and depression are globally prevalent conditions associated with maladaptive decision making. However, whether affective symptoms primarily amplify threat avoidance or dampen motivational drive remains debated, and behavioural studies yield inconsistent findings. Here we show that both anxiety and depression impair the fundamental cognitive process of translating objective value into decision evidence. Across independent cohorts from the US and India, participants evaluated risky gambles while we assessed choice behaviour and the centroparietal positivity, an EEG marker of accumulating decision evidence. Prospect theory parameters, like risk and loss aversion, showed little association with symptom severity. Conversely, hierarchical drift-diffusion modelling revealed that higher symptom scores predicted attenuated value sensitivity during evidence accumulation, whereas decision caution remained intact. This reduction in value sensitivity suggests internalizing symptoms disrupt choice at the value-to-evidence interface, offering a unified mechanism underlying biased decision making in affective disorders.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Differential representation of natural and manmade images in the human ventral visual stream

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWThe human visual cortex processes visual stimuli hierarchically. Early visual areas (V1, V2) of the ventral visual stream feed crude visual features (like orientation and edges) into later visual areas (V4, lateral occipital (Lat Occ), inferior temporal (IT)) that then encode complex visual features (like object form). Previous studies have reported a difference in fMRI responses between natural and urban landscapes in certain parts of the brain. Here we asked if this distinction in the representation of complex natural and man-made visual stimuli extends to the ventral visual stream and if state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNN) provide a map to this categorical distinction. To assess this, we used an open source fMRI data set of V1-4 and LatOcc BOLD responses to 1750 passively viewed natural and man-made grayscale images. The same images were fed into the pre-trained CORnet-S, a CNN designed to model hierarchical human visual processing layer-wise. To identify differences in representations within and between the human visual cortex and the CNN, we computed representational dissimilarity matrices. The BOLD response to the manmade and natural images shows correlation differences for the two categories, which increase across V4 and LatOcc. Such differences were also observed in the model CORnet-S for the layers V4 and IT. Our results suggest that the human visual cortex processes natural and manmade images differently starting from V4 and that this representational difference is modeled in CORnet-S. In both, categorical representation is progressively established in the later processing stages. This might indicate that the brain has perhaps developed two-distinct systems for their representations which can be directed through evolution. Further analysis may elucidate the contributory role of evolution towards this paradigm.

neuroscience↗