A simple model of recognition and recall memory

Nisheeth Srivastava Edward Vul

Computer Science, IIT Kanpur Dept of Psychology, UCSD
Kanpur, UP 208016 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla CA 92093
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract
We show that several striking differences in memory performance between recogni-
tion and recall tasks are explained by an ecological bias endemic in classic memory
experiments - that such experiments universally involve more stimuli than retrieval
cues. We show that while it is sensible to think of recall as simply retrieving
items when probed with a cue - typically the item list itself - it is better to think
of recognition as retrieving cues when probed with items. To test this theory, by
manipulating the number of items and cues in a memory experiment, we show
a crossover effect in memory performance within subjects such that recognition
performance is superior to recall performance when the number of items is greater
than the number of cues and recall performance is better than recognition when
the converse holds. We build a simple computational model around this theory,
using sampling to approximate an ideal Bayesian observer encoding and retrieving
situational co-occurrence frequencies of stimuli and retrieval cues. This model
robustly reproduces a number of dissociations in recognition and recall previously
used to argue for dual-process accounts of declarative memory.

1 Introduction
Over half a century, differences in memory performance in recognition and recall-based experiments
have been a prominent nexus of controversy and confusion. There is broad agreement among
memory researchers, following Mandler’s influential lead, that there are at least two different types
of memory activities - recollection, wherein we simply remember something we want to remember,
and familiarity, wherein we remember having seen something before, but nothing more beyond
it [8]. Recall-based experiments are obvious representatives of recollection. Mandler suggested that
recognition was a good example of familiarity activity.
Dual-process accounts of memory question Mandler’s premise that recognition is exclusively a
familiarity operation. They argue, phenomenologically, that recognition could also succeed successful
recollection, making the process a dual composition of recollection and familiarity [20]. Experimental
procedures and analysis methods have been designed to test for the relative presence of both processes
in recognition experiments, with variable success. These endeavors contrast with strength-based
single-process models of memory that treat recognition as the retrieval of a weak trace of item
memory, and recall as retrieval of a stronger trace of the same item [19].
The single/dual process dispute also spills over into the computational modeling of memory. Gillund
and Shiffrin’s influential SAM model is a single-process account of both recognition and recall [4]. In
SAM and other strength-based models of declarative memory, recognition is modeled as item-relevant
associative activation of memory breaching a threshold, while recall is modeled as sampling items
from memory using the relative magnitudes of these associative activations. In contrast, McClelland’s
equally influential CLS model is explicitly a dual-process model, where a fast learning hippocampal
component primarily responsible for recollection sits atop a slow learning neocortical component
responsible for familiarity [9]. Wixted’s signal detection model tries to bridge the gap between

31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017), Long Beach, CA, USA.
these accounts by allowing dual process contributions to combine additively into a unidimensional
strength variable [19]. While such pragmatic syntheses are useful, the field is still looking for a more
satisfactory theoretical unification.
The depth of the difference between the postulated dual processes of recollection and familiarity
depends inevitably on the strength of the quantitative and qualitative dissociations that previous
research has documented in memory tasks, prominent among which are recognition and recall.
Mandler, for instance, postulated a one-to-one mapping between recognition and familarity on one
hand and recall and recollection on the other [8], although other authors hold more nuanced views [20].
Notwithstanding such differences of opinion, the road to discovering useful single-process accounts
of declarative memory has to go through explaining the multiple performance dissociations between
recognition and recall memory tasks. To the extent that single process accounts of both tasks can
explain such dissociations, differences between recollection and familarity will not seem nearly as
fundamental.
Improved strength-based models have competently modeled a large array of recognition-recall
dissociations [13], but fail, or have to make intricate assumptions, in the face of others [20]. More
importantly, the SAM model and its descendants are not purely single-process models. They model
recognition as a threshold event and recall as a sampling event, with the unification coming from
the fact that both events occur using the same information base of associative activation magnitude.
We present a much simpler single process model that capably reproduces many critical qualitative
recognition-recall dissociations. In the process, we rationalize the erstwhile abstract associative
activation of strength-based memory models as statistically efficient monitoring of environmental
co-occurrence frequencies. Finally, we show using simulations and a behavioral experiment, that the
large differences between recognition and recall in the literature can be explained by the responses of
an approximately Bayesian observer tracking these frequencies to two different questions.

2 Model
We use a very simple model, specified completely by heavily stylized encoding and retrieval processes.
The encoding component of our model simply learns the relative frequencies with which specific
conjunctions of objects are attended to in the world. We consider objects x of only two types: items
xi and lists xl . We model each timestep as as a Bernoulli trial between the propensity to attend to
any of the set of items or to the item-list itself, with a uniform prior probability of sampling any
of the objects. Observers update the probability of co-occurrence, defined in our case rigidly as
1-back occurrence, inductively as the items on the list are presented. We model this as the observer’s
sequential Bayesian updates of the probability p(x), stored at every time step as a discrete memory
engram m.
Thus, in this encoding model, information about the displayed list of items is available in distributed
form in memory as p(xi , xl |m), with each engram m storing one instance of co-occurrence. The true
joint distribution of observed items,to the extent that it is encoded within the set of all task-relevant
memory engrams M is then expressible as a simple probabilistic marginalization,
X
p(xi , xl ) = p(xi , xl |m)p(m), (1)
m∈M

where we assume that p(m) is flat over M, i.e. we assume that within the set of memory engrams
relevant for the retrieval cue, memory access is random.
Our retrieval model is approximately Bayesian. It assumes that people sample a small subset of all
relevant engrams M0 ⊂ M when making memory judgments. Thus, the joint distribution accessible
to the observer during retrieval becomes a function of the set of engrams actually retrieved,
X
pMk (xi , xl ) = p(xi , xl |m)p(m), (2)
m∈Mk

where Mk denotes the set of first k engrams retrieved.

Following a common approach to sampling termination in strength-based sequential sampling memory
models, we use a novelty threshold that allows the memory retrieval process to self-terminate when
incoming engrams no longer convey significantly novel information [4, 13]. We treat the arrival of the

2
 Recall Recognition
Encoding Retrieval Encoding Retrieval

A A
B B A

C C

Sample from p(x| ) Sample from p( |A)

p( |x)
p(x| )

A B C X
Figure 1: Illustrating the ecological difference in retrieval during recognition and recall memory
experiments. We model recall retrieval as a probabilistic query about items conditioned on the item
list and recognition retrieval as a probabilistic query about the item list conditioned on the item
presented during retrieval. Since there are almost always more items than lists in classic memory
experiments, the second conditional distribution tends to be formed on a smaller discrete support set
than the former.

k th successive engram into working memory as a signal for the observer to probabilistically sample
from pMk . The stopping rule for memory retrieval in our model is for n consecutive identical samples
being drawn in succession during this internal sampling, n remaining a free parameter in the model.
This rule is designed to capture the fact that memory search is frugal and self-terminating [15]. The
sample drawn at the instant the novelty threshold is breached is overtly recalled. Since this sample is
drawn from a distribution constructed by approximately reconstructing the true encoded distribution
of situational co-occurrences, the retrieval model is approximately Bayesian. Finally, since our
encoding model ensures that the observer knows the joint distribution of event co-occurrences, which
contains all the information needed to compute marginals and conditionals also, we further assume
that these derivative distributions can also be sampled, using the same retrieval model, when required.
We show in this paper that this simple memory model yields both recognition and recall behavior.
The difference between recognition and recall is simply that these two retrieval modalities ask two
different questions of the same base of encoded memory - the joint distribution p(xi , xl ). We illustrate
this difference in Figure 1. During recall-based retrieval, experimenters ask participants to remember
all the items that were on a previously studied list. In this case, the probabilistic question being asked
is ’given xl , find xi ’, which our model would answer by sampling p(xi |xl ). In item-recognition
experiments, experimenters ask participants to determine whether each of several items was on a
previously shown list or not. We assert that in this case the probabilistic question being asked is
’given xi . find xl ’, which our model would answer by sampling p(xl |xi ).
Our operationalization of recognition as a question about the list rather than the item runs contrary to
previous formalizations, which have tended to model it as the associative activation engendered in
the brain by observing a previously seen stimulus - models of recognition memory assume that the
activation for previously seen stimuli is greater, for all sorts of reasons. In contrast, recall is modeled
in classical memory accounts much the same way as in ours - as a conditional activation of items
associated with retrieval cues, including both the item list and temporally contiguous items. Our
approach assumes that the same mechanism of conditional activation occurs in recognition as well -
the difference is that we condition on the item itself.

3
3 Basic prediction: fast recognition and slow recall

The sample-based threshold used to terminate memory retrieval in our model  does not depend on
the size of the support of the probability distribution being sampled from. This immediately implies
that, for the same threshold sample value, the model will take longer to approach it when sampling
from a distribution with larger support than when sampling from distributions with smaller support.
In classical memory experiments, observers are typically asked to memorize multiple items associated
with one, or a few, lists. Thus, there is an ecological bias built into classic memory experiments such
that |items|  |lists|. Making this assumption immediately rationalizes the apparent difference in
speed and effort between recognition and recall in our model. Because the recognition task samples
p(list|item), its sample complexity is lower than recall, which involves sampling p(item|list) from
memory.
To verify this numerically, starting from identical memory encodings in both cases, we ran 1000
simulations of recognition and recall respectively using our retrieval model, using a fixed n = 5 1 .
The results, measured in terms of the number of retrieval samples k drawn before termination in
each of the 1000 trials, are shown in the left panel of Figure 2. The sample complexity of recall is
evidently higher than for recognition2 . Thus, we suggest that the fundamental difference between
recognition and recall - that recognition is easier and recall is harder - is explicable simply by virtue
of the ecological bias of memory experiments that use fewer cues than stimuli.
The difference in speed between recollection and familiarity processes, as measured in recall and
recognition experiments, has been one of the fundamental motivations for proposing that two memory
processes are involved in declarative memory. Dual-process accounts have invoked priority arguments
instead, e.g. that information has to pass through semantic memory, which is responsible for
recognition, before accessing episodic memory which is responsible for recall [17].Single process
accounts following in the lineage of SAM [4] have explained the difference by arguing that recognition
involves a single comparison of activation values to a threshold, whereas recall involves competition
between multiple activations for sampling. Our model rationalizes this distinction made in SAM-style
sequential sampling models by arguing that recognition memory retrieval is identical to recall memory
retrieval; only the support of the distribution from which the memory trace is to be probabilistically
retrieved changes. Thus, instead of using a race to threshold for recognition and a sampling process
in recall, this model uses self-terminating sampling in both cases, explaining the main difference
between the two tasks - easy recognition and hard recall - as a function of typical ecological parameter
choices. This observation also explains the relative indifference of recognition tasks to divided
attention conditions, in contrast with recall which is heavily affected [2]. Because of the lower sample
complexity of recognition, fewer useful samples are needed to arrive at the correct conclusion.

4 An empirical test

The explanation our model offers is simple, but untested. To directly test it, we constructed a simple
behavioral experiment, where we would manipulate the number of items and cues keeping the total
number of presentations constant, and see how this affected memory performance in both recognition
and recall retrieval modalities. Our model predicts that memory performance difficulty scales up with
the size of the support of the conditional probability distribution relevant to the retrieval modality.
Thus recall, which samples from p(item|list), should become easier as the number of items to recall
per cue reduces. Similarly recognition, which samples from p(listlitem), should become harder as
the number of cues per item increases. Because classic memory experiments have tended to use more
items than cues (lists), our model predicts that such experiments would consistently find recognition
to be easier than recall. By inverting this pattern, having more cues than items, for instance, we would
expect to see the opposite pattern hold. We tested for this performance crossover using the following
experiment.

1
Our results are relatively independent of the choice of n, since for any value of n, recognition stays easier
than recall so long as the cue-item fan out remains large and vice versa.
2
Recall trials that timed out by not returning a sample beyond the maximum time limit (100 samples) are not
plotted. These corresponded to 55% of the trials, resulting in a recall hit rate of 45%. In contrast, the average
recognition hit rate was 82% for this simulation.

4
 Recognition Recall
2.5
400 400 Recognition
Recall
2
300 300

Trials 1.5

d'
200 200

1
100 100

0.5

0 0
0 50 100 0 50 100
0
{2,7} {3,5} {4,4} {5,3} {7,2}
Sample count Condition

Figure 2: (Left) Simulation results show easier recognition and harder recall given typical ecological
choices for stimuli and cue set sizes. (Right) Results from experiment manipulating the stimuli and
cue set size ratio. By manipulating the number of stimuli and cues, we predicted that we would
be able to make recall harder than recognition for experiment participants. The results support our
prediction unambiguously.Error bars show s.e.m.

We used a 2×2 within subject factorial design for this experiment, testing for the effect of the retrieval
mode - recognition/recall and either a stimulus heavy, or cue heavy selection of task materials. In
addition, we ran two conditions between subjects, using different parameterization of the stimuli/cue
ratios. In the stimulus heavy condition, for instance, participants were exposed to 5 stimuli associated
with 3 cues, while for the cue heavy condition, they saw 3 stimuli associated with 5 cues. The semantic
identity of the stimuli and cue sets were varied across all four conditions randomly, and the order of
presentation of conditions to participants was counterbalanced. All participants worked on all four
of the memory tasks, with interference avoided with the use of semantically distinct category pairs
across the four conditions. Specifically, we used number-letter, vegetable-occupation, fruit-adjective
and animal-place category pairs for the four conditions. Within each category, stimuli/cues for a
particular presentation were sampled from a 16 item master list, such that a stimulus could not occur
twice in conjunction with the same cue, but could occur in conjunction with multiple cues.
120 undergraduates participated in the experiment for course credit. Voluntary consent was obtained
from all participants, and the experimental protocol was approved by an institutional IRB. We told
experiment participants that they would be participating in a memory experiment, and their goal was
to remember as many of the items we showed them as possible. We also told them that the experiment
would have four parts, and that once they started working on a part, there would be no opportunity to
take a break until it ended. 80 participants performed the experiment with 3/5 and 5/3 stimulus-to-cue
mappings, 40 did it with 2/7 and 7/2 stimulus-to-cue mappings. Note that in all cases, participants
saw approximately the same number of total stimulus-cue bindings (3x5 = 15 or 2x7 = 14), thus
undergoing equivalent cognitive load during encoding.
Stimuli and cues were presented onscreen, with each pair appearing on the screen for 3 seconds,
followed by an ITI of equal duration. To prevent mnemonic strategy use at the time of encoding, the
horizontal orientation of the stimulus-cue pair was randomly selected on each trial, and participants
were not told beforehand which item category would be the cue; they could only discover this at
the time of retrieval3 . Participants were permitted to begin retrieval at their own discretion once
the encoding segment of the trial had concluded within each condition. All participants chose to
commence retrieval without delay. Participants were also permitted to take breaks of between 2-5
minutes between working on the different conditions, with several choosing to do so.
Once participants had seen all item-pairs for one of the conditions, the experiment prompted them to,
when ready, click on a button to proceed to the testing phase. In the recall condition, they saw a text
box and a sentence asking them to recall all the items that occurred alongside item X, where X was
randomly chosen from the set of possible cues for that condition; they responded by typing in the
words they remembered. For recognition, participants saw a sentence asking them to identify if X had
occurred alongside Y, where Y was randomly chosen from the set of possible cues for that condition.

3
An active weblink to the actual experiment is available online at [anonymized weblink].

5
After each forced yes/no response, a new X was shown. Half the X’s shown in the recognition test
were ’lures’ , they had not been originally displayed alongside Y.
Memory performance was measured using d’, which is simply the difference between the z-normed
hit rate and false alarm rate, as is conventional in recognition experiments. d’ is generally not used
to measure recall performance, since the number of true negatives is undefined in classic recall
experiments, which leaves the false alarm rate undefined as well. In our setup, the number of true
negatives is obviously the number of stimuli the participant saw that were not on the specific list
being probed, which is what we used to calculate d-prime for recall as well.
The right panel in Figure 2 illustrates the results of our experiment. The predicted crossover is
unambiguously observed. Further, changes in memory performance across the stimulus-cue set size
manipulation is symmetric across recognition and recall. This is precisely what we’d expect if set
size dependence was symmetrically affecting memory performance across both tasks as occurs in
our model. While not wishing to read too much into the symmetry of the quantitative result, we note
that such symmetry under a simple manipulation of the retrieval conditions appears to suggest that
the manipulation does in fact affect memory performance very strongly. Overall, the data strongly
supports our thesis - that quantitative differences in memory performance in recognition and recall
tasks are driven by differences in the set size of the underlying memory distribution being sampled.
The set size of the distribution being sampled, in turn, is determined by task constraints - and ends up
being symmetric when comparing single-item recognition with cued recall.

5 Predicting more recognition-recall dissociations

The fact that recognition is usually easier than recall - more accurate and quicker for the same stimuli
sets - is simply the most prominent difference between the two paradigms. Experimentalists have
uncovered a number of interesting manipulations in memory experiments that affect performance
on these tasks differentially. These are called recognition-recall dissociations, and are prominent
challenges to single-process accounts of the two tasks. Why should a manipulation affect only one
task and not the other if they are both outcomes of the same underlying process? [20] Previous
single-process accounts have had success in explaining some such dissociations. We focus here
on some that have proved relatively hard to explain without making inelegant dissociation-specific
assumptions in earlier accounts [13].

5.1 List strength effects and part set cuing

Unidimensional strength-based models of memory like SAM and REM fail to predict the list strength
effect [12] where participants’ memory performance in free recall is lower than a controlled baseline
for weaker items on mixed lists (lists containing both strongly and weakly encoded items). Such
behavior is predicted easily by strength-based models. What they find difficult to explain is that
performance does not deviate from baseline in recognition tasks. The classical explanation for this
discrepancy is the use of a differentiation assumption. It is assumed that stronger items are associated
more strongly to the encoding context, however differences between the item itself as shown, and
its encoded image are also stronger. In free recall, this second interaction does not have an effect,
since the item itself is not presented, so a positive list strength effect is seen. In recognition, it is
conjectured that the two influences cancel each other out, resulting in a null list strength effect [13].
A lot of intricate assumptions have to hold for the differentiation account to hold. Our model has
a much simpler explanation for the null list-strength effect in recognition. Recognition involves
sampling based on the strength of the associative activation of the list given a specific item and so
is independent of the encoding strength of other items. On the other hand, recall involves sampling
from p(item|list) across all items, in which case, having a distribution favoring other items will
reduce the probability that the unstrengthened items will be sampled. Thus, the difference in which
variable the retrieval operation conditions on explains the respective presence and absence of a list
strength effect in recall and recognition.
The left panel in Figure 3 presents simulation results from our model reproducing this effect, where we
implement mixed lists by presenting certain stimuli more frequently during encoding and retrieve in
the usual manner. Hit rates are calculated for less frequently presented stimuli. For either elicitation
modality, the actual outcome of the retrieval itself is sampled from the appropriate conditional

6
distribution as a specific item/cue. In this particular experiment, which manipulates how much
training observers have on some of the items on the list, the histories entering the simulation are
generated such that some items co-occur with the future retrieval cue more frequently than others, i.e.
two items occur with a probability of 0.4 and 0.3 respectively, and three items occur with a probability
of 0.1 each alongside the cue. The simulation shows a positive list strength effect for recall (weaker
hit rates for less studied items) and a null list strength effect for recognition, congruent with data.
Our model also reconciles the results of [1] who demonstrated that the list strength effect does not
occur if we examine only items that are the first in their category to be retrieved. For category-
insensitive strength-based accounts, this is a serious problem. For our account, which is explicitly
concerned with how observers co-encode stimuli and retrieval cues, this result is no great mystery.
For multi-category memory tests, the presence of each semantic category instantiates a novel list
during encoding, such that the strength-dependent updates during retrieval apply to each individual
p(item|list) and do not apply across the other category lists.
More generally, the dynamic nature of the sampled distribution in our Bayesian theory accommodates
the theoretical views of both champions of strength-dependent activation and retrieval-dependent
suppression [1]. Strength-dependent activation is present in our model in the form of the Bayesian
posterior over cue-relevant targets at the time when cued recall commences; retrieval-dependent
suppression of competitors is present in the form of normalization of the distribution during further
sequential Bayesian updates as the retrieval process continues. Assigning credit differentially to
individual categories predicts an attenuation (though not removal) of the list strength effect, due
to the absence of learning-induced changes for the first-tested items, as well diminishing memory
performance with testing position seen in [1].

1
Weak item hit rate

Recognition HR

1.0
Baseline 0.8 Recognition FAR

Mixed Recall HR
0.8
Fraction

0.6 Recall FAR

0.6
0.4
0.4
0.2
0.2

0 0
Recognition Recall 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Prepend ratio

Figure 3: Reproducing (left) list strength effects and (right) the word frequency mirror effect using
our model.

The part set cueing effect is the observation that showing participants a subset of the items to be
recalled during retrieval reduces their recall performance for non-shown items [11]. This effect does
not appear in recognition experiments, which is again problematic for unidimensional strength-based
memory models. Our model has a simple explanation. The presented items during retrieval are simply
treated as further encoding opportunities for the seen items, resulting in a list strength imbalance as
above. This affects recall, but not recognition for the same reasons the list strength effect does.

5.2 Mirror effect

Another interesting effect that strength-based memory models have found hard to explain is the
word-frequency mirror effect [5]. This is seen when participants see two different classes of items
in recognition experiments. It is found, for instance, that unique items are both recognized more
accurately as previously seen and unseen in such experiments than common items. Such a pattern of
memory performance is contrary to the predictions of nearly all accounts of memory that depend
on unidimensional measures of memory strength, who can only model adaptive changes in memory
performance via shifts in the response criterion [19] that do not permit both the hit rate and the false
alarm rate to improve simultaneously.

7
The essential insight of the mirror effect is that some types of stimuli are intrinsically more memorable
than others, a common-sense observation that has proved surprisingly difficult for strength-based
memory models to assimilate.This difficulty extends to our own model also, but our inductive frame-
work allows us to express the assumptions about information that the stimuli base frequency adds
to the picture in a clean way. Specifically, in our model observers use p(list|item) for recogni-
tion, which is high for unique items and low for common items by Bayesian inversion because
p(item|list)/p(item) ≈ 1 for unique items, because they are unlikely to have been encountered
outside the experimental context, and  1 for common items. In contrast, observers sample from
p(item|list) during recall, removing the effect of the frequency base rate p(item), so that the pattern
of results is inverted: performance is equivalent or better than baseline for common stimuli than for
rare ones [6], since they are more likely to be retrieved in general.
The right panel in Figure 3 shows simulation results using our model wherein we used two possible
cues during encoding, one to test performance during retrieval and one to modify the non-retrieval
frequency of stimuli encounters. For this experiment, which manipulates where we have to influence
how often the relative frequency with which the observers have seen the items in task-irrelevant
contexts other than the retrieval task, we prepended the base case history (of size 50 time steps)
with differently sized prior history samples (between 10 and 50 time steps long, in steps of 5),
wherein items co-occurred with cues that were not used during retrieval. The simulation results show
that, in recognition, hit rates drop and false alarm rates rise with more exposure to items outside
the experimental list context (high frequency items). Since our model assumes unambiguous cue
conditioning, it predicts unchanged performance from baseline for recall. More intricate models that
permit cue-cue associations may reproduce the advantage for common items documented empirically.

6 Discussion

We have made a very simple proposal in this paper. We join multiple previous authors in arguing that
memory retrieval in cued recall tasks can be interpreted as a question about the likelihood of retrieving
an item given the retrieval cue, typically the list of items given at the time of encoding [17, 8, 4].
We depart from previous authors in arguing that memory retrieval in item recognition tasks asks the
precisely opposite question: what is the likelihood of a given item having been associated with the
list? We integrated this insight into a simple inference-based model of memory encoding, which
shares its formal motivations with recent inference-based models of conditioning [3, 14], and an
approximately Bayesian model of memory retrieval, which samples memory frugally along lines
motivated on information-theoretic [18] and ecological grounds [16] by recent work.
Our model is meant to be expository and ignores several large issues that other richer models typically
engage with. For instance, it is silent about the time decay of memory particles, the partitioning of
the world into items and cues, and how it would go about explaining other more intricate memory
tasks like plurality discrimination and remember-know judgments. These omissions are deliberate, in
the sense that we wanted to present a minimal model to deliver the core intuition behind our approach
- that differences in memory performance in recognition and recall are attributable to no deeper
issue than an ecological preference to test memory using more items than lists. This observation
can now subsequently guide and constrain the construction of more realistic models of declarative
memory [3]. To the extent that differences traditionally used to posit dual-process accounts of memory
can be accounted for using simpler models like ours, the need to proliferate neuroanatomical and
process-level distinctions for various memory operations can be concomitantly reduced.
The distinction between recall and recognition memory also has important implications for the
presumed architecture of machine learning systems. Modern ML systems increasingly rely on a
combination of distributed representation of sensory information (using deep nets) and state-centric
representation of utility information (using reinforcement learning) to achieve human-like learning
and transfer capabilities, for example in simple Atari games [10]. The elicitation of class or category
membership in neural networks is quintessentially a recognition task, while the elicitation of state
value functions, as well as other intermediate computations in RL are clearly recall tasks. Partly
in realization of the large differences in the sort of memory required to support these two classes
of learning models, researchers have taken to postulating dual-process artificial memories [7]. Our
demonstration of the fundamental unitarity of the two modes of memory performance can and should
constrain the design of deep RL models in simpler ways.

8
References
[1] Karl-heinz Bäuml. The list-strength effect: Strength-dependent competition or suppression? Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 4(2):260–264, 1997.

[2] Fergus IM Craik, Richard Govoni, Moshe Naveh-Benjamin, and Nicole D Anderson. The effects of divided
attention on encoding and retrieval processes in human memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 125(2):159, 1996.

[3] Samuel J Gershman, David M Blei, and Yael Niv. Context, learning, and extinction. Psychological review,
117(1):197, 2010.
[4] Gary Gillund and Richard M Shiffrin. A retrieval model for both recognition and recall. Psychological
review, 91(1):1, 1984.

[5] Murray Glanzer and John K Adams. The mirror effect in recognition memory: data and theory. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16(1):5, 1990.

[6] Vernon Gregg. Word frequency, recognition and recall. John Wiley & Sons, 1976.

[7] Dharshan Kumaran, Demis Hassabis, and James L McClelland. What learning systems do intelligent agents
need? complementary learning systems theory updated. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(7):512–534,
2016.

[8] George Mandler. Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence. Psychological review, 87(3):252,
1980.
[9] James L McClelland, Bruce L McNaughton, and Randall C O’reilly. Why there are complementary learning
systems in the hippocampus and neocortex: insights from the successes and failures of connectionist
models of learning and memory. Psychological review, 102(3):419, 1995.
[10] Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G Bellemare,
Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller, Andreas K Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, et al. Human-level control through
deep reinforcement learning. Nature, 518(7540):529–533, 2015.
[11] Raymond S Nickerson. Retrieval inhibition from part-set cuing: A persisting enigma in memory research.
Memory & cognition, 12(6):531–552, 1984.

[12] Roger Ratcliff, Steven E Clark, and Richard M Shiffrin. List-strength effect: I. data and discussion. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16(2):163, 1990.

[13] Richard M Shiffrin and Mark Steyvers. A model for recognition memory: Rem—retrieving effectively
from memory. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 4(2):145–166, 1997.

[14] Nisheeth Srivastava and Paul R Schrater. Classical conditioning via inference over observable situation
contexts. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2014.

[15] Saul Sternberg. Memory-scanning: Mental processes revealed by reaction-time experiments. American
scientist, 57(4):421–457, 1969.
[16] Peter M Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer. Environments that make us smart: Ecological rationality. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 16(3):167–171, 2007.

[17] Endel Tulving and Donald M Thomson. Retrieval processes in recognition memory: Effects of associative
context. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 87(1):116, 1971.

[18] Edward Vul, Noah Goodman, Thomas L Griffiths, and Joshua B Tenenbaum. One and done? optimal
decisions from very few samples. Cognitive science, 38(4):599–637, 2014.

[19] John T Wixted. Dual-process theory and signal-detection theory of recognition memory. Psychological
review, 114(1):152, 2007.

[20] Andrew P Yonelinas. The nature of recollection and familiarity: A review of 30 years of research. Journal
of memory and language, 46(3):441–517, 2002.