Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States.
Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, Houston, United States.
Elife. 2022 Mar 15;11:e73610. doi: 10.7554/eLife.73610.
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.
基于随时间积累的证据进行决策取决于工作记忆，而工作记忆是有限的，但这些限制如何影响审慎决策尚不清楚。我们使用人类心理物理学来评估工作记忆限制对连续决策变量准确性的影响。参与者决定多个视觉目标的平均位置。该计算出的连续决策变量随时间和容量而降级，其方式严重依赖于用于形成决策变量的策略。这种依赖性反映了决策变量是：(1) 立即在观察证据后计算得出，并因此作为单个值存储在记忆中；还是(2) 在报告时计算得出，并因此作为多个值存储在记忆中。这些结果为大脑如何计算和维持随时间变化的决策变量提供了重要限制。
