A unified account of learning, memory, and categorization

什么是记忆？一个人丰富的先前经验是如何影响他们的决定的？对人类记忆的理解能导致智能机器的设计吗？我的研究计划就是为了回答这些问题。为了实现这一目标，我和我的学生开发了描述学习和分类的数学模型的计算机模型。我们通过将模型的行为与人的行为相匹配来测试模型。通过将记忆表示为特定经验的存储，并并行提取这些记忆，我们解释了人们如何对世界上的规律性变得敏感，他们将如何选择将项目分类，以及他们将如何在不同的学习环境下灵活地构思类别。

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.