Accordingly, it is important that computational models themselves be HDAC inhibitor grounded in sound neural engineering principles that impact how the models are framed, implemented, and

interpreted ( Eliasmith and Anderson, 2004 and Eliasmith, 2013). I gratefully acknowledge contributions of the many people in my lab who helped develop and apply the brain mapping tools we have generated over the past two decades. Also, the contributions of colleagues in the Human Connectome Project have been hugely important and are greatly appreciated. I thank Matt Glasser and Sandra Curtiss for comments on the manuscript and Susan Danker for assistance in manuscript preparation. This work is supported by NIH grant MH60974 and by 1U54MH091657, funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. “
“The study of decision making occurs within psychology, statistics, economics, finance, engineering (e.g., quality control), political science, philosophy, medicine, ethics, and jurisprudence. The neuroscience behind decision making touches on only a fraction

of these areas, although it is a frequent source of delight when a connection emerges between neural mechanisms and each of these areas. While decision making, per se, fascinates, what makes the neuroscience of decision making special is the Protease Inhibitor Library research buy insight it promises on a deeper topic. For the neurobiology of decision making is really the neurobiology of cognition—or at the very least a large component of cognition that is tractable to experimental neuroscience. It exposes principles of neural processing that underlie a variety of mental functions. Moreover,

we believe these same principles, enumerated below, will furnish critical insight into the pathophysiology of diseases that compromise cognitive function, and ultimately they will supply the key to ameliorating cognitive dysfunction. For this special issue of Neuron’s 25th anniversary, we focus on a line no of research that began almost exactly 25 years ago, in the laboratory of Bill Newsome. It is an honor to share our perspective on the field: its roots, an overview of the progress we have made, and some ideas about some of the directions we might pursue in the next 25 years. Approximately 25 years ago, Bill Newsome, Ken Britten, and Tony Movshon recorded from neurons in extrastriate area MT/V5 of rhesus monkeys while those monkeys performed a demanding direction discrimination task. They made two important discoveries. First, the fidelity of the single-neuron response to motion rivaled the fidelity of the monkey’s behavioral reports, in other words, choice accuracy. The fidelity of a neural response is a characterization of the relationship between its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the stimulus difficulty level.