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

ABSTRACT: 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 mu

SUBMITTER: Schapiro K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9005192 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature