Images of Memory

Kei Kreutler, convenor of the Memory Research Group, argues that digital metaphors for memory, such as caches and hard drives, miss how people actually experience recall. Reading Alan Jay Smith's 1987 paper on cache design alongside a blog post on LLM KV caching, the group found that caching rests on temporal and spatial locality. Kreutler notes that dust works as a natural "least recently used" indicator, but it shows what has gone untouched without showing why, and cache speed does not reflect a memory's helpfulness.