Journal
MEMORY
Volume 20, Issue 5, Pages 511-517Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2012.683010
Keywords
Free recall; Clustering; Semantic; Simulation; Latent semantic analysis
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Funding
- NIMH NIH HHS [R29 MH055687, F31MH088118, R01 MH055687-17, F31 MH088118-02, R01 MH055687, F31 MH088118, MH55687] Funding Source: Medline
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The order in which participants choose to recall words from a studied list of randomly selected words provides insights into how memories of the words are represented, organised, and retrieved. One pervasive finding is that when a pair of semantically related words (e. g., cat and dog) is embedded in the studied list, the related words are often recalled successively. This tendency to successively recall semantically related words is termed semantic clustering (Bousfield, 1953; Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944; Cofer, Bruce, & Reicher, 1966). Measuring semantic clustering effects requires making assumptions about which words participants consider to be similar in meaning. However, it is often difficult to gain insights into individual participants' internal semantic models, and for this reason researchers typically rely on standardised semantic similarity metrics. Here we use simulations to gain insights into the expected magnitudes of semantic clustering effects given systematic differences between participants' internal similarity models and the similarity metric used to quantify the degree of semantic clustering. Our results provide a number of useful insights into the interpretation of semantic clustering effects in free recall.
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