On the development of visual object memory: the stay/go decision problem

A developing memory requires a mechanism for deciding how much information to gather, based on what is currently represented in memory. That is, we need to know when we have seen enough to say we have or have not seen this before, or that we need to continue collecting data. We present a statistical approach to this decision mechanism. This serves as the foundation for a simple visual object memory. We present results from simulations showing that the statistical measure can serve as the basis of the stay/go decision process.