---
title: "Robert M. French"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Robert M. French"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-18T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["catastrophic forgetting","connectionism","representational overlap","McCloskey & Cohen (1989)","organizational forgetting"]
seek_code_commit: "729ee25"
---


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 [[entity-backpropagation|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 [[entity-mccloskey-cohen|McCloskey & Cohen's]] and [[entity-roger-ratcliff|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 [[entity-organizational-forgetting|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