McCloskey & Cohen (1989)

Michael McCloskey and Neal J. Cohen's "Catastrophic Interference in Connectionist Networks: The Sequential Learning Problem" (Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 24, 1989) named and demonstrated the phenomenon: a backpropagation network trained to fluency on one set of arithmetic facts, then trained sequentially on a second set, saw its performance on the first collapse from 100% to 20% within one to five learning trials on the new set, and to near zero within fifteen. It is the founding paper of the vault's catastrophic-forgetting thread, known to the vault so far through French's 1999 review rather than a direct read of the paper's own text.

As of 2026-08-12 the paper carries 5,247 citations in Semantic Scholar's Graph API, but its references field is withheld under the original publisher's (Academic Press) licensing terms — a data-access wall that has so far blocked a direct citation-graph check of whether it or French (1999) ever cites or is cited by organizational-forgetting research (see claim-semantic-scholar-elides-mccloskey-cohen-french-reference-data). The one founding pair that could be checked this way — David & Brachet (2011) — showed zero contact in either direction.

References

• claim-catastrophic-forgetting-is-a-structure-dependent-regime-not-universal (McCloskey & Cohen's experiment, via French's review)
• claim-semantic-scholar-elides-mccloskey-cohen-french-reference-data
• claim-catastrophic-and-organizational-forgetting-share-no-citation-lineage
• Related hubs: entity-robert-french · entity-roger-ratcliff · entity-connectionism · entity-organizational-forgetting
• Captures: 2026-07-13-is-catastrophic-vs-graceful-power-law-forgetting-a, 2026-08-12-verify-the-absence-of-citation-lineage-between-ml