A synthesizing habilitation thesis arguing that decision-making and the control of movement are not serial, independent stages but coupled processes governed by a shared, context-dependent urgency signal (the urgency-gating model). Drawing on two decades of single-neuron recordings in the sensorimotor cortex and basal ganglia of humans and non-human primates, it holds that the basal ganglia regulate the urgency of commitment rather than selecting targets, that speed-accuracy trade-offs are shared across deciding and moving, and that the field should adopt ecological, 'naturalistic' behavioral paradigms and latent-variable analyses to study brain-environment interactions.
This French habilitation thesis (HDR) synthesizes two decades of systems-neuroscience research on how the primate brain controls behavior through coupled decision-making and action. It argues against…