ABSTRACT

One of the many lessons Bob Bjork taught the second author (D.R.K.) in the course of many presentations in the Cogfog memory lab is the importance of being aware of the audience-what they know to start with, what they understand (or don’t) as you move forward, and what their likely criticisms will be. is advice bears on a phenomenon we have experienced in presenting our work on computational models of free recall (Kimball, Smith, & Kahana, 2007; Sirotin, Kimball, & Kahana, 2005). We have generally received quite dierent receptions from two types of audiences, both of which are oen represented on any given occasion. e rst type comprises empirical researchersthose who conduct experiments with human subjects to test various memory theories but who do not do any computational modeling. Although generally receptive toward our enterprise, these researchers oen want to know whether the model can accommodate ndings from paradigms other than free recall, such as cued recall and recognition memory. e implication in their questioning is that a model worth its salt should be able to explain empirical ndings in a wide variety of paradigms, and they quickly grow impatient-and to some degree dismissive-if the model has not been developed or tested as yet for use with such paradigms.