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

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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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 multiple values in memory. These results provide important constraints on how the brain computes and maintains temporally dynamic decision variables.

Data availability

All analysis code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/TheGoldLab/Memory_Diffusion_Task). Data used for figures will be made available on Dryad.

The following data sets were generated

(2022) Memory Diffusion Task Data
Dryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.w3r2280rm.

https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w3r2280rm

Article and author information

Author details

Kyra Schapiro

Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

For correspondence
kaschapiro@aol.com

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8308-0744
Kresimir Josic

Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, Houston, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Zachary P Kilpatrick

Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2835-9416
Joshua I Gold

Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Competing interests
Joshua I Gold, Senior editor, eLife.

Funding

National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH115557)

Kresimir Josic
Zachary P Kilpatrick
Joshua I Gold

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The task was created with PsychoPy3 and distributed to participants via Pavlovia.com, which allowed participants to perform the task on their home computers after providing informed consent. These protocols were reviewed by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board (IRB) and determined to meet eligibility criteria for IRB review exemption authorized by 45 CFR 46.104, category 2.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.