Memory array locations, delay times, and participant response

<p>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.  <br><br>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.</p>