Order within associations as a test of association-memory models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In learning associations (e.g., a pairing of items, A-B), the hippocampus appears to implement Associative Symmetry, namely, when learning a forward association (A->B), picking up the backward association (B->A) for free [3], a characteristic of human association-memory that has been replicated numerous times (e.g., [5]). A mathematical operation that does this automatically, and thus might be carried out by the hippocampus, is the convolution operation, the operation used to store associations in a range of influential behavioural memory models [2]. Convolution-based models lead to a specific prediction about within-pair order memory (the participant’s ability to retrieve the relative orders of the A and B items), namely, that within-pair order memory should be at chance levels. In contrast, models based on the outer product, known as matrix models [1] the way they have been applied, lead to perfect within-pair order memory (assuming the pairing is retrieved); likewise for numerous other models that assume associations are stored by concatenating the vector representations of paired items [6]. Here we test within-pair order memory with a verbal double-function list paradigm in which participants are presented with pairs of words in which the left-handed item of one pair is the right-handed item of a different pair. Thus, within-pair order information is critical for later effective cued recall. The results suggested that human participants have neither poor nor near-perfect memory for within-pair order, challenging all current models to our knowledge. Our recently proposed positional coding model for paired-associate memory [4], which already incorporates within-pair order in the same manner as between-pair order. Even this positional coding model requires some additional assumptions to fit the fine structure of the behavioural data. In sum, our findings suggest that within-pair order memory is neither poor nor perfect, pointing to a fallible mechanism for within-pair order learning in verbal association memory tasks and constraining the computational mechanisms the hippocampus could plausibly use to learn pairs with the property of Associative Symmetry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".