Recency is sufficient for reconciling categorisation and memory: Commentary on Devraj et al. (2024)

Abstract

Devraj et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02448-2, 2024) argued that findings which suggest that memories for items become less accessible over time conflict with categorisation findings where exemplar performance improves across training. To reconcile this, they highlighted that under real-world conditions items tend to reappear less frequently over time, thus preferentially maintaining new items can improve performance. Typical categorisation experiments instead distribute exemplars uniformly across trials. However, under a power-law stimulus distribution, Devraj et al. showed worsening fit for exemplar classification models across trials. They used..