TY - JOUR T1 - Allocation of Visuospatial Attention Indexes Evidence Accumulation for Reach Decisions JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0313-22.2022 VL - 9 IS - 6 SP - ENEURO.0313-22.2022 AU - Carolin Schonard AU - Tobias Heed AU - Christian Seegelke Y1 - 2022/11/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/9/6/ENEURO.0313-22.2022.abstract N2 - Visuospatial attention is a prerequisite for the performance of visually guided movements: perceptual discrimination is regularly enhanced at target locations before movement initiation. It is known that this attentional prioritization evolves over the time of movement preparation; however, it is not clear whether this build-up simply reflects a time requirement of attention formation or whether, instead, attention build-up reflects the emergence of the movement decision. To address this question, we combined behavioral experiments, psychophysics, and computational decision-making models to characterize the time course of attention build-up during motor preparation. Participants (nā€‰=ā€‰46, 29 female) executed center-out reaches to one of two potential target locations and reported the identity of a visual discrimination target (DT) that occurred concurrently at one of various time-points during movement preparation and execution. Visual discrimination increased simultaneously at the two potential target locations but was modulated by the experiment-wide probability that a given location would become the final goal. Attention increased further for the location that was then designated as the final goal location, with a time course closely related to movement initiation. A sequential sampling model of decision-making faithfully predicted key temporal characteristics of attentional allocation. Together, these findings provide evidence that visuospatial attentional prioritization during motor preparation does not simply reflect that a spatial location has been selected as movement goal, but rather indexes the time-extended, cumulative decision that leads to the selection, hence constituting a link between perceptual and motor aspects of sensorimotor decisions. ER -