Where decision-making, memory and personality meet: a cognitive-behavioral neuroscience study.

The idea that evidence accumulation is the only crucial factor for decision making has been recently challenged. Even during simple visual tasks, both impulsivity/prudence and working memory (WM) may also play a crucial role in its dynamics. We wanted to investigate how a wide range of sequences of visual evidence and the presence of a time gap (located in between such sequences) would interact with participants’ impulsivity (measured with a personality scale) to bias WM and/or the prioritization of speed over accuracy. 34 human adults (65% females, aged 18-48) performed a version of the tokens task, played on a computer: 15 dots (tokens) sequentially jumped (each 200 ms) from a central circle to a left or a right one, with variable probability, and then disappeared. Half of the trials had a time gap (of 300 ms), with no jumps, before the fourth token jumped (TG trials). Participants were asked to decide, before the end of the trial, which circle would receive the majority of the tokens. In TG trials, despite not being aware of the presence of the gap, participants decided after fewer jumped tokens (less information). Analyses suggested the size of this effect was positively correlated to a remarkably adaptive speed prioritization and, coherently, to higher trait premeditation scores. Besides, the time gap did not seem to cause WM losses. Moreover, we showed a stronger-than-thought robustness of specific cognitive-behavioral biases when comparing our results with previous ones (Keung et al., 2019) with differents pace, amount and modality of evidence.