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mental data structures
Jul. 15th, 2006 07:06 pmI've been thinking: how do people memorize long things? My proposal is that they use something like trinary trees.
7+-2 is a rather well-accepted "information-theoretic" limit on short-term memory: this is how many "chunks" one can keep in there. This is not modeled explicitly in ACT-R: there is only one "declarative memory".
One effective strategy is to put more information in each chunk. But it is obvious that one can only do this so much. Niels has said that in ACT-R, chunks with more information heavier, and become this way harder to retrieve.
Meaningful chunks, of course, are easier to remember (see c1, c3). The relationship between the slots means that once one of them is found, retrieving the other 2 will be easy (through the associations). Also, since they have links to many concepts (that's what "meaningful" means), it's easier to retrieve them. And I'm not even talking about truth constraints yet (in case you're trying to remember a set of true sentences).
(chunk-type node slot1 slot2 slot3)
(add-dm
(c0 ISA node
slot1 c1
slot2 c2
slot3 c3)
(c1 ISA node
slot1 Sun
slot2 Mercury
slot3 Venus)
(c2 ISA node
slot1 af31
slot2 dda4
slot3 0783)
(c3 ISA node
slot1 rats
slot2 people
slot3 elephants)
)
7+-2 is a rather well-accepted "information-theoretic" limit on short-term memory: this is how many "chunks" one can keep in there. This is not modeled explicitly in ACT-R: there is only one "declarative memory".
One effective strategy is to put more information in each chunk. But it is obvious that one can only do this so much. Niels has said that in ACT-R, chunks with more information heavier, and become this way harder to retrieve.
Meaningful chunks, of course, are easier to remember (see c1, c3). The relationship between the slots means that once one of them is found, retrieving the other 2 will be easy (through the associations). Also, since they have links to many concepts (that's what "meaningful" means), it's easier to retrieve them. And I'm not even talking about truth constraints yet (in case you're trying to remember a set of true sentences).
