Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connectionist models usually have a single weight on each connection. Some interesting newproperties emerge if each connection has two weights: A slowly changing, plastic weight which stores long-term knowledge and a fast-changing, elastic weight which stores temporary knowledge and spontaneously decays towards zero. If a network learns a set of associations and then these associationsare "blurred" by subsequent learning, all the original associations can be "deblurred" by rehearsing on just a few of them. The rehearsal allows the fast weights to take on values that temporarily cancel outthe changes in the slow weights caused by the subsequent learning.