Topic: mnemonic information

Decision making involves assessing potential options and their expected outcomes. In most laboratory studies, decision making is examined through perceptual discrimination tasks with constant net sensory information, and explained as an accumulation of evidence until a threshold is reached. However, natural behavior involves dynamic, intermittently presented perceptual information, necessitating the use of memory. A recent study indicates that, in such cases, decisions align better with an urgency mechanism, which combines sensory evidence from memory or perception with a growing urgency signa

Perceptual decision-making involves interpreting sensory information to guide actions. Incoming sensory information must often be assessed in the context of other relevant information held in working memory. Despite this interdependence, the neural basis of working memory and perceptual decision-making have largely been studied separately. Thus, how the brain flexibly combines sensory information with information in memory to form decisions remains unknown. To study this interaction, we developed a novel behavioral task in which monkeys hold a set of color images in working memory as context,