EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer) is a psychological theory of

learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, Attitude (psychology), attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and ...

and

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

implemented as a computer program. Originally designed by

Herbert A. Simon Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organi ...

and

Edward Feigenbaum Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems". Education and early life ...

to simulate phenomena in

verbal learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind ...

, it has been later adapted to account for data on the psychology of

expertise An expert is somebody who has a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education in a particular field or area of study. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized a ...

and

concept formation Concept learning, also known as category learning, concept attainment, and concept formation, is defined by Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) as "the search for and testing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from non exemplar ...

. It was influential in formalizing the concept of a

chunk Chunk or chunky may refer to: __NOTOC__ Fictional characters * Chunk (comics), a DC Comics character * Chunk (''Toy Story 3''), in the 2010 film ''Toy Story 3'' * Chunk, in the 1985 film ''The Goonies'' * Chunk Palmer, in ''Bull'', a 2016 America ...

. In EPAM, learning consists in the growth of a discrimination network. EPAM was written in IPL/V. The project was started in the late 1950s with the aim to learn

nonsense syllable A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes whi ...

s. The term nonsense is used because the learned patterns are not connected with a meaning but they are standing for their own. The software is working internally by creating a decision tree. An improved version is available under the name “EPAM-VI”.

Related cognitive models

CHREST CHREST (Chunk Hierarchy and REtrieval STructures) is a symbolic cognitive architecture based on the concepts of limited attention, limited short-term memories, and chunking. The architecture takes into low-level aspects of cognition such as referen ...

* Soar

References

*Feigenbaum, E. A., & Simon, H. A. (1962). A theory of the serial position effect. British Journal of Psychology, 53, 307–320. *Feigenbaum, E. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). EPAM-like models of recognition and learning. Cognitive Science, 8, 305–336. *Gobet, F., Richman, H. B., Staszewski, J. J., & Simon, H. A. (1997). Goals, representations, and strategies in a concept attainment task: The EPAM model. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 37, 265–290. *Richman, H. B., Gobet, F., Staszewski, J. J., & Simon, H. A. (1996). Perceptual and memory processes in the acquisition of expert performance: The EPAM model. In K. A. Ericsson (Ed.), The road to excellence (pp. 167–187). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. *Richman, H. B., Staszewski, J. J., & Simon, H. A. (1995). Simulation of expert memory with EPAM IV. Psychological Review, 102, 305–330. Cognitive architecture {{Comp-sci-stub