Limitations in visual working memory (VWM) have been extensively studied in psychophysical tasks, but not well understood in terms of how memory limits translate to performance in more natural domains. For example, in reaching to grasp an object based on a spatial memory representation, overshooting the intended target may be more costly than undershooting, such as when reaching for a cup of hot coffee. The current body of literature lacks a detailed account of how the physical consequences and costs of memory error influence what we encode in visual memory, and how we act on the basis of remembered information. Here, we study whether externallyimposed monetary costs influence behavior in a task that involves motor planning based on information recalled from VWM. Our results indicate that subjects accounted for the uncertainty in their visual memory, showing a significant difference in their motor planning when monetary costs were imposed for memory errors. However, our findings indicate that subjects’ memory representations per se were not biased by the imposed costs, but rather subjects adopted a near-optimal post-mnemonic decision strategy

Recent evidence indicates that color categories can exert astrong influence over color matching in both perception andmemory. We explore this phenomenon by analyzing the costfunction for perceptual error. Our analysis is developed withinthe mathematical framework of rate–distortion theory. Ac-cording to our approach, the goal of perception is to minimizethe expected cost of error while subject to a strong constrainton the capacity of perceptual processing. We propose that thecost function in color perception is defined by the sum of twocomponents: a metric cost associated with the magnitude of er-ror in color space, and a cost associated with perceptual errorsthat cross color category boundaries. A computational modelembodying this assumption is shown to produce an excellent fitto empirical data. The results generally suggest that what ap-pear as ‘errors’ in working memory performance may reflectreasonable and systematic behaviors in the context of costs.