Human Associative Memory

• Human Associative Memory is the title of a 1979 book by Anderson and Bower.
• The basic idea is that you have items in your memory.
• These items are things like words (e.g. red or book), things (cars, my car, or my first car), people (me, my wife, John Anderson) and so forth.
• These items have a host of associations.
• I associate John Anderson with Carnegie Mellon, cognitive architectures, rules, tutorial systems, and Trieste among other things.
• In turn those things are associated with other things including of course possibly the original concept.
• This builds up a graph (or a web) of knowledge.
• It's robust and flexible.
• It's not rule based.
• It's not defintional.
• Rules and definitions can fit in as nodes just like red.