REM-II : A Model of the Developmental Co-Evolution of Episodic Memory and Semantic Knowledge

Episodic memories are formed from the interpretation of events by semantic knowledge, while semantic knowledge is formed by the accumulation of episodic memories. Through this two-way process, our extensive episodic memory for events in the past co-evolves with our vast knowledge about the world. We present REM-II, a new bayesian account of episodic and semantic memory that explicitly models the development of these two aspects of our long-term memory. REM-II encodes episodic traces as sets of features with different values, and semantic knowledge as a set of co-occurrences of these features. The use of feature co-occurrence allows polysemy and connotation of meaning to be encoded within a single structure, and begins to approach the complexity of human knowledge. We demonstrate knowledge formation in REM-II and show the emergence of semantic spaces through experience and the resultant polysemy and biasing of encoding that REM-II produces. Appearing in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Development and Learning, 5, 2006.