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Updated: May 10, 2026

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Scaling laws of associative memory retrieval
Sandro Romani1, Itai Pinkoviezky, Alon Rubin
1Weizmann Institute, Department of Neurobiology, Rehovot, Israel 76100. sandro.romani@gmail.com
Abstract:
Most people have great difficulty in recalling unrelated items. For example, in free recall experiments, lists of more than a few randomly selected words cannot be accurately repeated. Here we introduce a phenomenological model of memory retrieval inspired by theories of neuronal population coding of information. The model predicts nontrivial scaling behaviors for the mean and standard deviation of the number of recalled words for lists of increasing length. Our results suggest that associative information retrieval is a dominating factor that limits the number of recalled items.
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