Qualitative description Sample Clauses

Qualitative description. We start by going back to the moment of encoding of item X. At that instant, the agent (Xxxxx) had to make an estimate of the frequency of occurrence of CoRs for X, in order to estimate the overall importance of such contexts. Let us imagine she picked a frequency of around ‘once per week’. A year goes by. In that time, Xxxxx finds that her knowledge of X did not come up even once: in our terminology, there were no CoRs for X in that time. Based on this evidence, Xxxxx (being a rational sort) is going to come to the conclusion that her original frequency estimate was rather badly out of kilter with reality, and that it could do with revising downwards – in all likelihood, her new estimate should be closer to once per year. This is a simple example of what is a more general observation: whatever Xxxxx’s initial frequency estimate, the more time that passes without a CoR occurring, the lower her estimated frequency should drift. That drift in the estimated frequency implies a corresponding drift downwards of the encoding strength, following the reasoning from Section 3.5. This drift will manifest as pure trace decay: it is a contribution that is independent of anything besides time. This is a simple, systematic law, which satisfies our above criterion for something that can be applied across items with minimal calculation or thought of any kind. We now go into its proof, starting from the mathematical results of Chapter 4.