Memory array locations, delay times, and participant response

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.  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.