Robotic Dreams: A Computational Justification for the Post-Hoc Processing of Episodic Memories

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System (SS-RICS), we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous experiences. As part of the development of the event memory store justification for an off-line, unconscious, cueing process was tested. Three strategies for the recognition of previous events were compared. The first strategy stored all memories and searched all of the memories for a match to the current event. The second strategy searched memories while an event was taking place and started the search with the most recent memory first. Finally, a third strategy post-processed all memories using pruning, abstraction, and cueing. Pruning removed memories, abstraction used categories to reduce metric information, and the cueing process provided pointers for the subsequent recognition of episodes. We found that post-processing memories as an unconscious process was the most efficient strategy. This computational implementation provides a justification for the post-processing of memories as an efficient means of memory retrieval.