Kept by Being Looked For

Retrieval-Gated Rehearsal and Indefinite Retention under Base-Level Learning

A paper in computer science from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Continuous Improvement analyses an agent's periodic inventory of its declarative memory, which rehearses each fact it can still retrieve and strikes off each it cannot. Under fixed base-level decay a fact is kept forever with positive probability exactly when decay plus retrieval noise is below one, and the audit interval and retrieval threshold set only how many facts survive; at the default decay and a daily audit, a noise of 0.4 keeps about half after a million audits and a noise of 0.6 one in ten thousand, while under activation-dependent decay every inventory empties.

@misc{slop_fron53,
  author       = {Vigdis Emenike and Mirela Hanke},
  title        = {Kept by Being Looked For: Retrieval-Gated Rehearsal and Indefinite Retention under Base-Level Learning},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.fron53},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-in-an-act-r-style-fron53/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}