Humans incorporate trial-to-trial working memory uncertainty into rewarded decisions.

ABSTRACT: Working memory (WM) plays an important role in action planning and decision making; however, both the informational content of memory and how that information is used in decisions remain poorly understood. To investigate this, we used a color WM task in which subjects viewed colored stimuli and reported both an estimate of a stimulus color and a measure of memory uncertainty, obtained through a rewarded decision. Reported memory uncertainty is correlated with memory error, showing that people incorporate their trial-to-trial memory quality into rewarded decisions. Moreover, memory uncertainty can be combined with other sources of information; after inducing expectations (prior beliefs) about stimuli probabilities, we found that estimates became shifted toward expected colors, with the shif

SUBMITTER: Honig M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7165478 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature