{"pk":26615,"title":"A normative theory of visual working memory limitations","subtitle":null,"abstract":"There are many benefits to having a highly accurate representation of the environment. Why, then, has evolutionequipped us with a visual working memory (VWM) system that can represent only a handful of items with high accuracy?Here, we offer a normative explanation for this limitation by conceptualizing VWM as a system that balances between twoconflicting goals: keeping memory errors small and spiking activity low. We formalize this trade-off in a loss function andshow that minimization of loss dictates a strategy in which memory precision declines with the number of remembered items.Using psychophysical data from 67 human subjects in 5 delayed-estimation experiments, we show that this normative modelprovides an excellent account of human VWM limitations. These results suggest that human VWM implements an optimalcompromise between two conflicting ecological goals","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xt3r4j6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Ronald","middle_name":"van den","last_name":"Berg","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Uppsala","department":""},{"first_name":"Wei","middle_name":"Ji","last_name":"Ma","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26615/galley/16251/download/"}]}