Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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