Mathematical models of human memory

Abstract

Human memory is an incredibly complex system of vast capacity but often unreliable. Measuring memory for realistic material, such as narratives, is quantitatively challenging as people rarely remember narratives verbatim. Cognitive psychologists developed experimental paradigms involving randomly collected lists of items that make possible quantitative measures of performance in memory tasks, such as recall and recognition. Here, we describe a set of mathematical models designed to predict the results of these experiments. The models are based on simple underlying assumptions and surprisingly agree with experimental results quite well, in addition to that they exhibit quite interesting mathematical behavior that can partially be understood analytically.