Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We provide a definition of ‘memory’ that is broad enough to apply to both natural and artificial systems. Inspired by computation and information theory, we define memory as a process that preserves information through time while maintaining its usefulness as an object to be computed. We defend the extensiveness of our definition by explaining how it applies to both brains and modern computers. We then consider potential objections to our definition. Our primary goal is to provide a definition of ‘memory’ that is broadly applicable across various cognitive sciences subfields.