Life Sciences Faculties

The study of human memory is a rich field with a history that spans over a century, traditionally investigated through the prism of psychology. Drawing inspiration from this vast pool of findings, we approached the subject with a more physics-oriented mindset based on first principles. For this reason, we combined mathematical modelling of established ideas from the literature of psychology with large-scale experimentation. In particular, we created a model based on the concept of retroactive interference that states that newly encoded items hinder the retention of older ones in memory. We show that this simple mechanism is sufficient to describe a variety of experimental data of recognition memory with different categories of verbal and pictorial stimuli. The model has a single free parameter and can be solved analytically. We then focus on recall and recognition memory of stories. This transition from discrete random lists to coherent continuous stimuli such as stories introduces a new challenge when it comes to the quantification and the analysis of the results. To address this, we have developed a pipeline that employs large language models and showed that it performs comparably to human evaluators. Using this tool we were able to show that recall scales linearly with recognition and story size for the range we examined. Finally, we discovered that when stories are presented in a scrambled manner, even though recall performance drops, subjects seem to reconstruct the material in their recall in alignment to the unscrambled version.