Investigating category transitions and interresponse times in fluency tasks

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Neuroscience
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Semantic fluency tasks involve rapid item recall from categories.
• These tasks exhibit heavy-tailed interresponse time (IRT) distributions, mirroring natural foraging behavior.
• The study investigates if extended IRTs are linked to category transitions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if long interresponse times (IRTs) in semantic fluency tasks occur specifically at category transitions.
• To model the distribution of IRTs and identify patterns related to switching between semantic or letter-based categories.
• To explore the relationship between memory retrieval dynamics and optimal foraging principles.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments used semantic and letter-based fluency tasks with varying category scopes.
• Interresponse times (IRTs) were modeled using normal, lognormal, and power-law distributions.
• Category transitions were identified using behavioral ratings and algorithmic similarity measures.

Main Results:

• Lognormal distributions provided the best fit for IRTs at both group and individual levels, confirming heavy-tailed memory search.
• The longest IRTs were observed immediately following a category switch, not during it.
• This suggests a brief cognitive adjustment period when shifting to a new item cluster.

Conclusions:

• Memory retrieval processes exhibit heavy-tailed distributions consistent with optimal foraging theory.
• The findings highlight shared dynamics in spatial, semantic, and abstract information retrieval.
• Longest retrieval latencies post-transition indicate an adaptive exploration phase in memory search.