Student Daily Digest

Dr. Rey will be presenting the work titled “I've forgotten almost nothing of that first kiss: the long survival of each of our mental events.” We look forward to having you with us! Your participation and insights would be greatly valued.

 

Abstract: According to the self-organizing consciousness theory (Perruchet & Vinter, BBS, 2002), whenever we process or pay attention to some information, we create a transient memory trace of that information. Most of these traces fade over time. However, if this information is processed repeatedly within relatively short intervals (as happens with regularities in our environment), the corresponding memory trace strengthens and begins to shape our mental processes. In a series of experiments with both human and non-human primates, using a modified version of the Hebb paradigm, I will show how these memory traces survive and reinforce over time. I will argue that these findings prompt us to reconsider the role of forgetting in current computational models of statistical learning, and perhaps even the way modern deep neural networks (DNN) learn. They may also help address the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument, which is often used to challenge the idea that association-based systems (like DNNs) are adequate models of language.