mewmew
commented
8 years ago Narrowing down the research was difficult, but we ended up with three main models of associative memory. As we had little previous experience and knowledge in this area, critically evaluating the research literature was quite challenging, and even more so to critically self-evaluate the job we made at doing so, as we are basically trapped within the understanding of the field as presented to us by the research literature, and of course by general logic trying to find more general flaws in the research methods or theoretical arguments presented. The ability to critically evaluate research literature in fields where one has little prior knowledge will remain a challenging one, and we should strive to seeks ways of training this ability and look for methods to help make it easier.
Now we conduct the full literature review, trying both to objectively outline what has been done within the field, compare the results of different approaches, and critically evaluating what has been written. Are the authors clearly stating the assumptions that their work build upon, if the work generalizes or if it is only capable of solving specialized problems. This is particularly important, as the term associative memory may be vague and many authors may try to solve different problems, thus making their results difficult to compare objectively.