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Perceptual suboptimality: Bug or feature?

Christopher SummerfieldVickie Li
Published in: The Behavioral and brain sciences (2019)
Rahnev & Denison (R&D) argue that whether people are "optimal" or "suboptimal" is not a well-posed question. We agree. However, we argue that the critical question is why humans make suboptimal perceptual decisions in the first place. We suggest that perceptual distortions have a normative explanation - that they promote efficient coding and computation in biological information processing systems.
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