ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Humans incorporate trial-to-trial working memory uncertainty into rewarded decisions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rapid changes in risk attitudes originate from Bayesian inference on parietal magnitude representations.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Serial dependence during visuomotor integration is robust to the passage of time and interference from intervening tasks.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Perceptual confidence has near perfect access to the existence of discrete representations, but only weak access to precision.Cognition · 2026Article
- Probabilistic working memory representations in human cortex guide behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Confidence and Insight into Working Memory Are Shaped by Attention and Recent Performance.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Humans use underestimates of auditory spatial and temporal uncertainty for perceptual inference.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- The interplay of uncertainty, relevance and learning influences auditory categorization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Perceptual and attentional uncertainty impact global performance monitoring.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Adaptive forgetting speed in working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- I remember it now, so I'll remember it later: Working memory strength guides predictions for long-term memory performance.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Bayesian confidence in optimal decisions.Psychological review · 2024Article
- Robustly encoding certainty in a metastable neural circuit model.Physical review. E · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Perceptual similarity judgments do not predict the distribution of errors in working memory.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2024Article
- Bayesian inference is facilitated by modular neural networks with different time scales.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Probabilistic and rich individual working memories revealed by a betting game.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Awareness of the relative quality of spatial working memory representations.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- There Is no Theory-Free Measure of "Swaps" in Visual Working Memory Experiments.Computational brain & behavior · 2023Article
- You cannot "count" how many items people remember in visual working memory: The importance of signal detection-based measures for understanding change detection performance.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Working memory (WM) plays an important role in action planning and decision making; however, both the informational content of memory and how that information is used in decisions remain poorly understood. To investigate this, we used a color WM task in which subjects viewed colored stimuli and reported both an estimate of a stimulus color and a measure of memory uncertainty, obtained through a rewarded decision. Reported memory uncertainty is correlated with memory error, showing that people incorporate their trial-to-trial memory quality into rewarded decisions. Moreover, memory uncertainty can be combined with other sources of information; after inducing expectations (prior beliefs) about stimuli probabilities, we found that estimates became shifted toward expected colors, with the shift increasing with reported uncertainty. The data are best fit by models in which people incorporate their trial-to-trial memory uncertainty with potential rewards and prior beliefs. Our results suggest that WM represents uncertainty information, and that this can be combined with prior beliefs. This highlights the potential complexity of WM representations and shows that rewarded decision can be a powerful tool for examining WM and informing and constraining theoretical, computational, and neurobiological models of memory.
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