Topic: human recall

Compression is a fundamental process required for storing and subsequently retrieving long and meaningful sequences such as narratives from memory. To understand how compression may arise in human memory, we develop a statistical model of memory retrieval for meaningful material, in which semantic structures are abstracted into a hierarchy of keypoints, each representing a compressed version of the underlying clauses. Our model is motivated by a small set of basic principles, inspired by behavioral and neuroscience experiments on human processing of naturalistic stimuli. Our model predicts com