Memory instability as a gateway to generalization

Our present frequently resembles our past.Patterns of actions and events repeat throughout our lives like a motif.Identifying and exploiting these patterns are fundamental to many behaviours, from creating grammar to the application of skill across diverse situations.Such generalization may be dependent upon memory instability.Following their formation, memories are unstable and able to interact with one another, allowing, at least in principle, common features to be extracted.Exploiting these common features creates generalized knowledge that can be applied across varied circumstances.Memory instability explains many of the biological and behavioural conditions necessary for generalization and offers predictions for how generalization is produced.Our past experience can aid our current and future performance.For instance, being a skilled tennis player may help when it comes to playing other racquet sports such as squash.Encouraging the transfer of skill from one situation to another also lies at the heart of many brain training and rehabilitative strategies.The ability to generalize from a specific example to a category or concept is not restricted to the world of actions.The location of a reward in a navigation task can be found more quickly in subsequent versions of the task even though key aspects of the task, including the location of the reward, change [1].Similarly, generalization can occur across different objects, facts, or events to create categories.Generalization therefore plays a key role in a wide array of cognitive functions.Yet, despite its clear importance and adaptive value, how and when generalization occurs is poorly understood. Instability as opportunityGeneralization requires the identification of features common across experiences.For example, a common element of some navigation tasks is that a food pellet is never visible but is instead always buried within the sand.To discover the common feature requires a comparison and hence an interaction between memories for the different tasks.Interactions between memories can also lead to interference, after which a memory either is lost or becomes