PSYCH 140M Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Tree Traversal, Spreading Activation, Mental Chronometry
Document Summary
Disorders of concept and schema based memory. Easier to recall words when given first letter rather than any other letter. Information like names, at some level, organized by the first letter. Subjects retrieved words from memory using retrieval cues: Giving category first (then the first letter) led to faster. We store things according to semantic categories. Semantic memory holds a huge amount of information. We are able to answer questions about our semantic memory very quickly. We store memory in a more organized and structured fashion. Presented t/f statements to subjects and measured reaction time. Reaction time dependent on tree search distance. Collins and quillian model takes into account inference. We can answer questions we"ve never explicitly been given the information about. We"ve probably never been told that information but we can infer that this is the case. The idea of hierarchical distance is confounded with familiarity . A canary has skin is not only farther away in the hierarchy.
