When nothing is “off the record”: Exploring the theoretical implications of the continuous recording of cognitive process in memory

Abstract

This theoretical paper explores the idea of acropetal memory; arguing that representations emanating from all stages of processing an individual stimulus can be registered in memory and potentially available for recall. I describe Lansdale (1998) HELM model of location memory as a suitable candidate theory within which to implement and test this idea. An exemplar model, HELM-2, is presented and examined against available data. This model provides a satisfactory account of the data and an elegant solution to some interesting puzzles. It also suggests that some retrieval failure can be attributed to interference from representations of a stimulus derived from early stages of processing and that this has much broader implications for modelling encoding, forgetting, and false memory.