Chang Ma

People suddenly forget what they are going to do when they encounter a new environment. This is a everyday phenomenon, and we want to explore whether CTM can exhibit this phenomenon like human beings. The phenomenon can be psychologically explained by Radvansky’s Event Horizon Mode. According to this model, event boundaries are what causes sudden forgetting —— streams of information were segmented into event units, and the doorway or the boundaries between segments cause sudden forgetting, as people tend to update their event models when crossing event boundaries. Such update activate new model and deactivate previous model , and leads to the doorway effect.

Our proposal is to investigate the Doorway Effect via the Conscious Turing Machine. We hope to model an event horizon with the Conscious Turing Machine(CTM)[Blum & Blum, 2021], i.e. reveal the machine to two consecutive events and see if it experiences sudden forgetting, as well as finding a theoretically and psychologically plausible explanation as for why this phenomenon occurs.

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