Memory Consolidation — References

The literature on why durable memory requires a separate, slower rewriting process, and on what that process does to the record it rewrites.

Why consolidation is a separate process

• Why There Are Complementary Learning Systems in the Hippocampus and Neocortex: Insights from the Successes and Failures of Connectionist Models of Learning and Memory — James L. McClelland, Bruce L. McNaughton and Randall C. O'Reilly, Psychological Review, 1995. The argument that fast capture of individual experiences and slow integration into general knowledge must be separate systems, and what goes wrong when they are not. Cited by name.
• Catastrophic Interference in Connectionist Networks: The Sequential Learning Problem — Michael McCloskey and Neal J. Cohen, in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Volume 24, Academic Press, 1989. The failure mode that motivates slow, interleaved integration rather than overwriting. Cited by name.

What rewriting does to a record

• Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology — Frederic C. Bartlett, Cambridge University Press, 1932. Repeated reproduction of remembered material shortens it, regularises it, and makes it more confident and more wrong — the empirical basis for bounding generation depth. Cited by name.
• Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory — Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1974. How the framing used during a retelling is incorporated into what is subsequently remembered. Cited by name.

Deriving standing knowledge in agents

• Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior — Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang and Michael S. Bernstein, ACM UIST,
  2023. A periodic step that reads accumulated observations and writes higher-level inferences back into the same store, including the recursion that produces inferences over inferences. Cited by name.

Mechanics of a rewriting pass

• The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) — Patrick O'Neil, Edward Cheng, Dieter Gawlick and Elizabeth O'Neil, Acta Informatica, 1996. Compaction as a background process that rewrites accumulated writes into fewer, denser structures, with the staging and atomic-swap discipline that implies. Cited by name.

No verified reference is recorded for consolidation cadence in agent memory systems, for generation-depth caps, or for separating faithful compression from inference. These are engineering decisions without published study.