Probabilistic and rich individual working memories revealed by a betting game.

ABSTRACT: When asked to remember a color, do people remember a point estimate (e.g., a particular shade of red), a point estimate plus an uncertainty estimate, or are memory representations rich probabilistic distributions over feature space? We asked participants to report the color of a circle held in working memory. Rather than collecting a single report per trial, we had participants place multiple bets to create trialwise uncertainty distributions. Bet dispersion correlated with performance, indicating that internal uncertainty guided bet placement. While the first bet was on average the most precisely placed, the later bets systematically shifted the distribution closer to the target, resulting in asymmetrical distributions about the first bet. This resulted in memory performance improvements

SUBMITTER: Jabar SB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10684519 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature