Strategy-dependent effects of working-memory limitations on human perceptual decision-making

eLife

Zachary P Kilpatrick¹  Joshua I Gold²  Krešimir Josić³  Kyra Schapiro⁴ 

[1] Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, United States;Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States;Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, Houston, United States;Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;

关键词: decision making;    working memory;    psychophysics;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.73610

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Deliberative decisions based on an accumulation of evidence over time depend on working memory, and working memory has limitations, but how these limitations affect deliberative decision-making is not understood. We used human psychophysics to assess the impact of working-memory limitations on the fidelity of a continuous decision variable. Participants decided the average location of multiple visual targets. This computed, continuous decision variable degraded with time and capacity in a manner that depended critically on the strategy used to form the decision variable. This dependence reflected whether the decision variable was computed either: (1) immediately upon observing the evidence, and thus stored as a single value in memory; or (2) at the time of the report, and thus stored as multiple values in memory. These results provide important constraints on how the brain computes and maintains temporally dynamic decision variables.

【 授权许可】

Unknown