Predicting the Future With a Scale-Invariant Temporal Memory for the Past
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Updated: Oct 6, 2025

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Wei Zhong Goh1, Varun Ursekar2, Marc W Howard3
1Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, U.S.A. weizhong@bu.edu.
Abstract:
In recent years, it has become clear that the brain maintains a temporal memory of recent events stretching far into the past. This letter presents a neurally inspired algorithm to use a scale-invariant temporal representation of the past to predict a scale-invariant future. The result is a scale-invariant estimate of future events as a function of the time at which they are expected to occur. The algorithm is time-local, with credit assigned to the present event by observing how it affects the prediction of the future. To illustrate the potential utility of this approach, we test the model on simultaneous renewal processes with different timescales. The algorithm scales well on these problems despite the fact that the number of states needed to describe them as a Markov process grows exponentially.
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