"Modelling forgetfulness as a personal trait: an initial exploration"

Forgetfulness in learning new concepts has long been explored in the field of psychology of education. From Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve to Duolingo’s Half-Life Regression algorithm, many approaches have been proposed to model forgetfulness in order to improve learning. In general, forgetfulness is modelled as a function of time only, and in some cases as also a property of the concepts to be learned. Using a dataset of second language learning exercises on word recall, I discuss the possible usefulness of considering the individual tendency to forget to better model memory’s decay of learned words.

Bio: Massimo Zancanaro is a full professor of Computer Science at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science of the University of Trento and the head of the Intelligent Interfaces and Interaction Research Unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. His research interests are in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and specifically on the topic of Intelligent Interfaces for which he is interested in investigating aspects related to the design as well as to study the reasons for use and non-use.