PSY 214 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Spreading Activation, Descriptive Knowledge
Knowledge
Types of knowledge (Separate Systems)
• Episodic Memory
o Memories for specific events in which you were somehow involved; one's personal past experiences.
o Aware of the original learning context
• Semantic Memory
o General knowledge; no info of how it was acquired
o Not aware of the original leaning context
o Represented/Organized
▪ Collins & Quillian (1969) Hierarchical Model
• Cognitive economy
o Store information at the highest level
possible & avoid storing redundant
info.
• Links
o “is a”
o Property
• Assumptions
o Retrieving the property and traversing
the hierarchy takes time
o Times are additive
o Times are level independent
• Testing the Model
o Sentence verification task
▪ participants are asked to decide as quickly as possible if a sentence is true or
false
▪
• Problems
o Cannot handle negative sentences
o Typicality effect → typical instances of a category are responded to faster than atypical
o Predicts that a dog is a mammal should be faster than a dog is an animal, but it is not.
▪ Collins & Loftus (1975) Spreading Activation Theory
• Activating one memory triggers the activation of related memories
• Assumptions
o Activation spreads on all paths
o Activation spreads in parallel
o Activation decreases over time
o Complex decision rules on negative trials
• Lexical decision Test
