Humans and animals have an impressive ability to juggle multiple tasks in a constantly changing environment. This flexibility, however, worsens performance under uncertain task conditions. Here we combined monkey electrophysiology, human psychophysics and artificial neural network modeling to investigate the neuronal mechanisms underlying this performance cost.
We developed a behavioral paradigm to measure and influence participants’ decision-making and perception in two distinct perceptual tasks. Our data reveal that both humans and monkeys, unlike an artificial neural network trained for the same tasks, make less accurate perceptual decisions when the task is uncertain. By comparing this neural network trained to produce correct choices with another network trained to replicate the participants’ choices, we hypothesize that the cost of task uncertainty comes from feature interference.
Through behavioral, physiological and causal experiments, we show that, under uncertain conditions, feature interference causes errors by inducing stronger representations of irrelevant features and entangled neuronal representations of different features. Our results suggest that cognitive capacity limitations may stem from interference between neural representations of different stimuli, tasks or memories. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Receive 12 print issues and online access Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout The monkey behavioral, electrophysiology recording and microstimulation data generated in this study have been deposited on figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32975354.
The human psychophysics behavioral data have been deposited in the same repository. Source data are provided with this paper. Code for RNN training and analyses is available at https://github.com/solkm/interferenceRNN.
Code for network simulations, analyses of electrophysiology data and behavioral data is available at https://github.com/ChengXueNeuro/interferenceRNN. Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making. Neuron 110, 2503–2511 (2022).
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