Practice-related changes in perceptual evidence accumulation correlate with changes in working memory.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Decision Science

Background:

• Evidence accumulation is theorized to influence both simple perceptual decisions and complex cognitive functions like working memory (WM).
• Previous research indicates a correlation between evidence accumulation estimates from diffusion decision modeling and WM performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether practice-induced changes in evidence accumulation correlate with changes in WM performance.
• To test the hypothesis that decision-making and WM share underlying mechanisms related to maintaining internal representations.

Main Methods:

• Utilized diffusion decision modeling combined with latent factor modeling.
• Analyzed data from the COGITO Study involving 101 young adults over 6 months of cognitive training.
• Included simple reaction time tasks and WM tasks across 100 training sessions.

Main Results:

• Established latent factors of evidence accumulation that correlated across choice tasks.
• Found positive correlations between latent factors of evidence accumulation and WM tasks (both practiced and unpracticed) before and after training.
• Demonstrated that individual differences in changes in evidence accumulation positively correlated with changes in WM performance.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the proposition that decision making and WM rely on the active maintenance of task-relevant internal representations.
• Suggests that improvements in evidence accumulation through practice contribute to enhanced WM performance.