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Monkeys and humans take local uncertainty into account when localizing a change
Deepna Devkar1, Anthony A Wright1, Wei Ji Ma2,3
1Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy, University of Texas Medical School, Houston, TX, USA.
Journal of Vision
|September 7, 2017
Summary
Human and monkey subjects consider stimulus reliability when making visual working memory decisions. Observers weigh low-reliability information less, demonstrating adaptive memory use across species.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Comparative Psychology
Background:
- Sensory perception is inherently noisy, leading to observer uncertainty about stimulus identity.
- While observers use uncertainty in perception tasks, its role in visual working memory remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether humans and monkeys account for stimulus reliability-driven uncertainty in visual working memory.
- To compare decision-making models in visual working memory tasks across species.
Main Methods:
- Ten human and two monkey subjects performed a visual working memory task involving orientation change detection.
- Stimulus reliability was manipulated by varying ellipse elongation, independently for each stimulus.
- Data were fitted using models with and without an uncertainty-aware decision rule.
Main Results:
- An "uncertainty-indifferent" model poorly explained the data in both species.
- A model incorporating reliability-driven uncertainty provided a significantly better fit.
- Lower-reliability stimuli were assigned less weight in decision-making.
Conclusions:
- Observers, including monkeys and humans, integrate reliability-driven uncertainty into their visual working memory decisions.
- This suggests an adaptive weighting strategy where less reliable information is discounted.
- Findings support evolutionary continuity in working memory systems between humans and monkeys.
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