Memory-Limited U-Shaped Learning

U-shaped learning is a learning behaviour in which the learner first learns something, then unlearns it and finally relearns it. Such a behaviour, observed by psychologists, for example, in the learning of past-tenses of English verbs, has been widely discussed among psychologists and cognitive scientists as a fundamental example of the non-monotonicity of learning. Previous theory literature has studied whether or not Ushaped learning, in the context of Gold’s formal model of learning languages from positive data, is necessary for learning some tasks. It is clear that human learning involves memory limitations. In the present paper we consider, then, this question of the necessity of U-shaped learning for some learning models featuring memory limitations. Our results show that the question of the necessity of Ushaped learning in this memory-limited setting depends on delicate tradeoffs between the learner’s ability to remember its own previous conjecture, to store some values in its longterm memory, to make queries about whether or not items occur in previously seen data and on the learner’s choice of hypothesis space.