How activation, entanglement, and searching a semantic network contribute to event memory

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Words are organized in semantic/associative networks.
• Memory recall can be influenced by implicit activation of related words.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide evidence that memory for word events depends on activating related words in semantic neighborhoods.
• To investigate how semantic network priming affects memory encoding and retrieval.

Main Methods:

• Review of evidence from extralist-cuing, primed free-association, intralist-cuing, and single-item recognition tasks.
• Analysis of how neighborhood density, cue-to-target strength, and target-to-cue strength influence recall.
• Modeling memory performance using network-derived measures.

Main Results:

• Processing a word primes its network representation, increasing recall and recognition, especially in working memory.
• Semantic network activation yields priming benefits during encoding and search costs during retrieval.
• Recall is negatively related to cue-to-distractor strength and positively to neighborhood density, cue-to-target, and target-to-cue strength.

Conclusions:

• The semantic network's contribution to memory varies with task context.
• Network measures can predict memory performance.
• Both spreading-activation and quantum-like entanglement models are evaluated for explaining priming effects.