Colloquium: Clustering as a common principle underlying short-term memory and episodic memory

A general conclusion arising from empirical and modelling work from the past 40 years is that people hierarchical structure information in short-term memory tasks such as serial recall and probed recall. Current theories assume that people cluster a large sequence into smaller subsequences, and that items are cued for based on their containing cluster, and their position within the group. I will present some data on the timing of recall that provide further evidence on how these clusters are accessed, and will argue that these principles extend to episodic memory. I will argue that clustering gives us a natural way of thinking about episodes in episodic memory, and will show how a serial recall model can account for key data from the episodic memory task of free recall.