A unified account of learning, memory, and categorization

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What is a memory? How does a person's wealth of prior experience come to influence the decisions they make? Can an understanding of human memory lead to the design of intelligent machines? My research program is aimed at answering these questions. To achieve this goal my students and I develop computer models that describe the mathematics of learning and categorization. We test the models by matching the behaviour of the models against that of people. By representing memory as a store of specific experiences, and retrieving those memories in parallel, we have explained how people become sensitive to regularities in the world, how they will choose to sort items into categories, and how they will conceive of categories flexibly under different learning circumstances.