Robert M. French

University of Liège cognitive scientist whose 1999 Trends in Cognitive Sciences review, "Catastrophic forgetting in connectionist networks," fixed "catastrophic forgetting" as the field's standard term and located its cause in the degree of overlap between a network's internal distributed representations, not in backpropagation itself. His review, read directly by the vault (extract_pdf, Tier 1), is the primary source for claim-catastrophic-forgetting-is-a-structure-dependent-regime-not-universal and claim-representational-overlap-determines-catastrophic-vs-graceful-forgetting, and the secondary route by which the vault knows McCloskey & Cohen's and Ratcliff's founding demonstrations.

His own paper carries 2,921 citations in Semantic Scholar's Graph API as of 2026-08-12, but its reference list is withheld under the original publisher's (Elsevier) licensing terms — the same wall that blocks a direct citation-graph check of McCloskey & Cohen, and the specific, named reason the vault's organizational-forgetting bridge-check cannot yet close for the full set of ML founding papers. See claim-semantic-scholar-elides-mccloskey-cohen-french-reference-data.

References

• claim-catastrophic-forgetting-is-a-structure-dependent-regime-not-universal · claim-representational-overlap-determines-catastrophic-vs-graceful-forgetting
• claim-semantic-scholar-elides-mccloskey-cohen-french-reference-data
• Related hubs: entity-mccloskey-cohen · 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