Department of Cognitive Sciences, The University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, The University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2023 Jun;23(3):645-665. doi: 10.3758/s13415-023-01092-6. Epub 2023 Jun 8.
Expectations can inform fast, accurate decisions. But what informs expectations? Here we test the hypothesis that expectations are set by dynamic inference from memory. Participants performed a cue-guided perceptual decision task with independently-varying memory and sensory evidence. Cues established expectations by reminding participants of past stimulus-stimulus pairings, which predicted the likely target in a subsequent noisy image stream. Participant's responses used both memory and sensory information, in accordance to their relative reliability. Formal model comparison showed that the sensory inference was best explained when its parameters were set dynamically at each trial by evidence sampled from memory. Supporting this model, neural pattern analysis revealed that responses to the probe were modulated by the specific content and fidelity of memory reinstatement that occurred before the probe appeared. Together, these results suggest that perceptual decisions arise from the continuous sampling of memory and sensory evidence.
期望可以为快速、准确的决策提供信息。但是，是什么决定了期望呢？在这里，我们检验了这样一种假设，即期望是通过从记忆中进行动态推理来设定的。参与者进行了线索引导的感知决策任务，其中记忆和感官证据可以独立变化。线索通过提醒参与者过去的刺激-刺激配对来建立期望，这些配对预测了随后嘈杂的图像流中可能出现的目标。参与者的反应既使用了记忆信息，也使用了感官信息，这符合它们的相对可靠性。正式的模型比较表明，当模型的参数在每个试验中根据从记忆中采样的证据动态设置时，对感官推断的解释最为准确。支持该模型的是，神经模式分析表明，对探针的反应受到探针出现之前记忆恢复的具体内容和保真度的调节。总的来说，这些结果表明，感知决策是由对记忆和感官证据的连续采样产生的。
