An integrative account of memory and reasoning phenomena

There is growing consensus that human memory is mediated by multiple qualitatively different systems co-evolved to function in a complementary way. As a result, memory should be studied not only using direct tests of memory but also using other tasks that naturally require memory access. This article presents an attempt at using the declarative memory systems in CLARION (termed the Non-Action-Centered Subsystem or NACS) to account for a wide range of psychological phenomena involving both the direct and indirect use of declarative memory. We advocate an architectural approach, which is broad-based (rather than depth-based). As such, the explanations presented herein, from psychological domains as diverse as human memory, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and heuristic reasoning, were based on architectural properties of CLARION and most of them did not require the adjustment of any numerical parameter. This article concludes with a comparison of CLARION with alternative views of memory systems.