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Mathematical constraints on a theory of human memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2011

Simon Dennis
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, mav@psy.uq.edu.au; mh@dys.ug.edu.au;
Michael S. Humphreys
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, mav@psy.uq.edu.au; mh@dys.ug.edu.au;
Janet Wiles
Affiliation:
Departments of Computer Science and Psychology, University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia,janetw@cs.ug.edu.au

Abstract

Colonius suggests that, in using standard set theory as the language in which to express our computational-level theory of human memory, we would need to violate the axiom of foundation in order to express meaningful memory bindings in which a context is identical to an item in the list. We circumvent Colonius's objection by allowing that a list item may serve as a label for a context without being identical to that context. This debate serves to highlight the value of specifying memory operations in set theoretic notation, as it would have been difficult if not impossible to formulate such an objection at the algorithmic level.

Type
Authors' Response
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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