To achieve Metachange’s objective several theoretical and technical developments were required. First, we needed to develop an experimental decision-making task which would allow us not only to precisely detect when participants made their choice but also allow us to manipulate the information available to them immediately after their decision as well as to measure how confident they were in the outcome. This was achieved by combining conventional psychophysical methods with real-time mouse tracking to detect decision onset with high precision. This novel behavioural paradigm was calibrated on 15 healthy participants and validated on another group of 15 healthy participants.
Second, we needed to adapt this novel task to the context of invasive electroencephalography (sEEG). Indeed, sEEG is performed in participants with pharmacologically intractable epilepsy, who are implanted with invasive electrodes throughout their cortex during the course of their medical treatment, which required further testing and development, as experiences were performed at their bedside in the hospital, an environment much less stable and controlled than the usual laboratory setting. Seven epileptic participants were recorded across two recording centers, and the data collection process is still ongoing. In order to analyse the ensuing data a novel preprocessing tool was developed, allowing us to convert the raw electrophysiological data recorded at the bedside of patients into a usable dataset following the gold standards of data curation within our field. This tool was designed to be versatile and has been made freely available to the scientific community.
Finally, several analytic tools were developed to begin to make sense of the neural activity recorded during our experiments, including tools based on previous research and novel tools based on machine learning techniques. Again, these tools were freely shared with the scientific community, in the spirit of transparency and open science.
