Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science is an archipelago of concepts and models,with cross-pollination between topics of interest often prohib-ited by incompatible approaches. Despite this, behavioral per-formance universally depends on information transmission be-tween brain regions and is limited by physical and biologicalconstraints. These constraints can be formalized as informa-tion theoretic constraints on transmission, which provide nor-mative predictions across a surprising range of cognitive do-mains. To illustrate this, we describe a simple variable-lengthrate coding model built with Poisson processes, Bayesian in-ference, and an entropy-based decision threshold. This modelreplicates features of human task performance and provides aprincipled connection between a high-level normative frame-work and neural rate codes. We thereby integrate several dis-joint ideas in cognitive science by translating plausible con-straints into information theoretic terms. Such efforts to trans-late concepts, paradigms and models into common theoreti-cal languages are essential for synthesizing our rich but frag-mented understanding of cognitive systems.