Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reviews six approaches to solving the problem of 'catastrophic sequential interference". It is concluded that all of these methods function by reducing (or circumventing) hidden-layer overlap. A new method is presented, called 'random rehearsal training', that further explores an approach introduced by Hetherington and Seidenberg (1989). A constant number of patterns, randomly selected from those learned earlier, is rehearsed with every newly learned pattern. This scheme of rehearsing patterns may, perhaps, be compared to the functioning of the 'aniculatory loop' (Baddeley, 1986). It is shown that this presentation method may virtually eliminate sequential interference.