ABSTRACT
The third module handles monitoring and control. This overseer system is needed for technical reasons in the model, but turns out to have very interesting and adaptive psychological implications. Without a monitor and some means of trace compression, as more and more associative vectors (which are the result of convolution), are added into the composite memory trace, the variability of that trace would increase without limit. Because the variance increases differentially depending on exactly how similar the incoming association is to the trace itself, with associations that are unrelated to the trace augmenting it least, and associations that are highly similar to the trace increasing it most, it is not possible to apply an across-the-board solution (like dividing everything by a constant) to this problem. Instead, the similarity of the incoming item to the cumulative episodic memory trace must be computed and the feedback signal, which adjusts the weightings on the incoming association and the trace, adjusted accordingly. The signal computed by the monitor, thus, is a scalar value that summarises the similarity of the incoming event to a weighted episodic memory trace. This feedback signal is then used to renormalise the trace: those events that are highly similar to the trace receive a low weighting and those that are dissimilar receive a high weighting.
