---
title: "McCloskey & Cohen (1989)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "McCloskey & Cohen (1989)"
aliases: ["Michael McCloskey and Neal J. Cohen","Catastrophic Interference in Connectionist Networks"]
first_seen: "2026-07-18T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["catastrophic forgetting","connectionism","backpropagation","Robert French","organizational forgetting"]
seek_code_commit: "729ee25"
---


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 [[entity-backpropagation|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 [[entity-connectionism|catastrophic-forgetting]] thread, known to the vault so far through [[entity-robert-french|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 [[entity-robert-french|French (1999)]] ever cites or is cited by [[entity-organizational-forgetting|organizational-forgetting]] research (see [[claim-semantic-scholar-elides-mccloskey-cohen-french-reference-data]]). The one founding pair that *could* be checked this way — [[entity-david-brachet|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