ABSTRACT
A striking finding in the literature on human memory is the profound but selective deficit seen after damage to the hippocampus and related structures in the temporal lobes of the human brain. This pattern of deficits was first seen in patient H. M., and has now been replicated in the data of a large number of other patients with similar lesions. The chapter considers what happens in D. E. Rumelhart's semantic network if someone tries to teach it some new information in either of two different ways. The first way, which calls focused learning, involves leaching the network the new information all at once, without interleaving it with ongoing exposure to the structure of the entire domain. The second way, which calls interleaved learning, involves simply introducing the new information into the mix of experiences that characterize the entire domain.
