AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Parallel processing psychology3/15/2023 If every apricot we see is orange, we come to treat this as an inherent characteristic of apricots. Memory generalizes over examples.Ī third crucial characteristic of memory is that it allows us to form generalizations. For example, if we are told that someone has been shot by someone else from a distance of 300 yards, we are likely to recall later that a rifle was used, even though this was not mentioned when we heard about the original event. Sometimes these intrusions are misleading, but often enough they are in fact helpful reconstructions based on things we know about similar memories. Pieces of information that were not part of the original experience intrude on our recollections. The computer-file metaphor also misses the fact that when we recall, we often fill in information that could not have been part of the original record. Is enough for many people to identify Pete Rose, even through the cues about baseball and betting on sports would not generally be sufficient as cues individually, since each matches too many memories. Even more interesting, each individual element of the description may be nearly useless by itself, if it applies to many memories only the combination needs to be unique. Any description that uniquely identifies a memory is likely to be sufficient for recall. However, what actually happens in human memory is that we access memories by their contents. Memories are accessed by content.įirst of all, the natural way of accessing records in a computer is by their address in the computer. There are several problems with this view. On this metaphor, we store a copy of an idea or experience in a file, which we can later retrieve and reexamine. Characteristics of MemoryĪ common metaphor for human memory might be called the "computer file" metaphor. The article ends with a brief discussion of the techniques that have been developed for adjusting connection strengths in PDP systems. Strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches are considered, and a synthesis is presented. Following this, two specific models are presented that capture key characteristics of memory in slightly different ways. Then a brief statement of the general characteristics of PDP systems is given. The article begins with a common metaphor for human memory, and shows why it fails to capture several key characteristics of memory that are captured by the PDP approach. They are sometimes also called connectionist models because the knowledge that governs retrieval is stored in the strengths of the connections among the elements. The computational models are called parallel distributed processing (PDP) models because memories are stored and retrieved in a system consisting of a large number of simple computational elements, all working at the same time and all contributing to the outcome. This article describes a class of computational models that help us understand some of the most important characteristics of human memory. PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING MODELS OF MEMORY
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |