Selective attention and decision-making have separable neural bases in space and time

Attention and decision-making processes are fundamental to cognition. However, they are usually experimentally confounded, making it difficult to link neural observations to specific processes. Here we separated the effects of selective attention from the effects of decision-making on brain activity obtained from human participants (both sexes), using a two-stage task where the attended stimulus and decision were orthogonal and separated in time. Multivariate pattern analyses of multimodal neuroimaging data revealed the dynamics of perceptual and decision-related information coding through time with magnetoencephalography (MEG), through space with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and their combination (MEG-fMRI fusion). Our MEG results showed an effect of attention before decision-making could begin, and fMRI results showed an attention effect in early visual and frontoparietal regions. Model-based MEG-fMRI fusion suggested that attention boosted stimulus information in the frontoparietal and early visual regions before decision-making was possible. Together, our results suggest that attention affects neural stimulus representations in the frontoparietal regions independent of decision-making.