Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty.

Feature interference explains the behavioral cost of task uncertainty in monkeys and humans, where uncertain conditions produce less accurate perceptual decisions linked to stronger irrelevant-feature representations.

• Why it matters: Task uncertainty degrades performance, but the neuronal mechanism is unclear, especially whether interference between features drives the errors.
• What they did: The study combined monkey electrophysiology, human psychophysics, and artificial neural network modeling, using a two-task perceptual paradigm plus behavioral, physiological, and causal tests.
• The result: Under uncertain conditions, feature interference is shown to induce stronger representations of irrelevant features and entangled neuronal representations, implying cognitive capacity limits can arise from representational interference.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.