Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

For all intents and purposes, catastrophic interference, the sudden and complete forgetting of previously stored information upon learning new information, does not exist in healthy adult humans. But does it exist other animals? In light of recent research done by McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly (1995) and McClelland & Goddard (1996) on the role of the hippocampal-neocortical interaction in alleviating catastrophic interference, it is of particular interest to ascertain whether catastrophic interference occurs in nonhuman higher animals, especially in those animals with a hippocampus and a neocortex, such as the rat. In this paper, we describe experimental evidence to support our claim that this type of radical forgetting does, in fact, exist for certain types of learning in some higher animals, specifically, in the rat's learning of time-durations. We develop a connectionist model that could provide an insight into how the rat might be encoding time-duration information.