Memory array locations, delay times, and participant response (Q6717397)

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.  The following data is the responses and trial information collected from each subject in each condition: Simultaneous Perceived,  Simultaneous Computed, Sequential Perceived, and Sequential Computed.