Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Based on an interference theory of forgetting in short-term memory (STM), we model STM by a network of neural limits with mutual inhibition. Sequences are acquired by combining a Hebbian learning rule and a normalization rule with sequential system activation. As long as sequences are acquired, they can be recognized without being affected by speeds in presentation. The model of sequence reproduction consists of two reciprocally connected networks, one of which behaves as sequence recognizers. Reproduction of complex sequences is shown to be able to maintain interval lengths of sequence components. A mechanism of degree self-tuning based on a global inhibitor is proposed for the model to optimally learn required context lengths in order to disambiguate associations in complex sequence reproduction.