ABSTRACT
Memory' and related words, such as 'forgetting', are words with numerous and varied meanings in common, everyday speech. Three types of situations that meet these criteria are when: a comparison stimulus or stimuli occur when the sample stimulus is no longer present; reinforcement becomes available a critical time following some stimulus that is no longer present; and responses other than the target response interfere with the target response. The first type of situation requires either neurological encoding or encoding in a surrogate stimulus to account for the occurrence of the target response. The second type of situation, mediating behaviour can provide the surrogate stimulus required for accurate timing of a relatively short interval. In the third type of situation, failure of the target response to occur is due to competing responses. It is sometimes useful, both for descriptive and for theoretical purposes, to analogize between computer memory and the memory of humans and animals.
