A Spreading Activation Theory Of Semantic
What Is Spreading Activation? (with pictures)
Spreading activation is a method for searching associative networks, neural networks, or semantic networks. The search process is initiated by labeling a set of.
A Spreading Activation Theory of Semantic Processing
The concept dog, points to other concepts like bark, beagle and pet, possibly causing someone to think about these related words.
The statement, A chinchilla is an animal, would take longer to process because chinchillas are not common animals.
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Emily Daw
Edited By: Kaci Lane Hindman
Last Modified Date: 01 November 2015
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Spreading activation is a model of working memory, also known as short-term memory, that seeks to explain how the mind processes related ideas, especially semantic or verbal concepts. The spreading activation model is one way cognitive psychologists explain the priming effect, which is the observable phenomenon that a person is able to more quickly recall information about a subject once a related concept has been introduced. According to this model, semantic long-term memory consists of a vast, interrelated network of concepts. When a person is presented with any concept, the concepts most closely connected to it are activated in that person s mind, preparing or priming him or her to recall information related to any of them.
According to the theory of spreading activation, each semantic concept has a node in the neural network that is activated at the same time as the nodes for related concepts. If a person is presented with the concept dog, nodes for concepts like bark, beagle and pet might be activated, priming him or her to think about these related words. Depending on which concept relating to dog is presented next, the person is able to recall any information that might be relevant to the task at hand. One such task might be to evaluate the accuracy of semantic statements. The person could, for instance, more quickly verify the statement A beagle is a dog if he or she already knows that the topic at hand is dog.
The stronger the connection between the ideas, the more quickly the person is able to recall relevant information. A person can probably verify very quickly the statement A bird is an animal, because birds are very common, typical examples of the category animal. On the other hand, the same person would likely take significantly longer to process and verify the statement A chinchilla is an animal, because a chinchilla is an atypical member of the category. The model of spreading activation would account for this difficulty by saying that the node for chinchilla would not necessarily be activated by the category animal.
Of course, the associations between semantic concepts vary greatly from person to person. Someone who has a pet chinchilla, for example, will have far greater connections between animal and chinchilla than the general population. In this way, the semantic categories described by spreading activation are a product both the actual content and of the individual experience. For this reason, the spreading activation model is very useful for describing how the mind has responded to a semantic task, but not necessarily useful for predicting how a person will respond to any given task.
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anon937347
Post 2
Funnily enough, Telsyst, there s a seminal article that remarks about exactly the same metaphor: From Computers to Anthills by Gardenfors.
Telsyst
Post 1
This is an interesting model of how the mind works. I can t help but be reminded of anthill optimization when reading this piece.
If an ant finds a trail left chemically by an ant, that ant is more likely to follow that trail. This ant will be leaving its own chemicals which makes the chemical trail stronger and so more ants will be attracted to this trail.
This optimization causes great numbers of ants to move with precision. A large number of ants could just wander off in many directions, but this keeps them in line.
The pheromones do dissipate over time, so if a trail doesn t lead anywhere, it isn t picked up by other ants, and so that trail
is swept away.
A forager ant looking for food, when finding a meal, can then go back to the main group following its own chemical trail, thereby strengthening that trail. When arriving back to the main group, it will lead other ants down the same trail, leaving no chance for error.
In 1909, Charles S. Peirce proposed a graphical notation of nodes and edges called existential graphs that he called the logic of the future.
A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness Bernard J. Baars. Preface and Chapter 1 Full text PDF and ascii available at Baars s homepage.
Current semantic theories offer diverging perspectives on how word meaning is acquired, represented and processed in the human brain. One tradition views the cognitive basis of meaning as a symbolic, amodal system containing abstract representations defined in terms of semantic features or correlations between words, bearing no explicit relationship with the concrete objects and actions the symbols are used to speak about adapted from Collins Loftus, 1975; Potter, 1979; Ellis Young, 1988. A putative brain basis for such a system of symbolic-conceptual representations has been attributed to semantic hubs , higher-association multimodal areas located in frontal, temporal and parietal cortices which have been found active during, or even to be necessary for, semantic processing Price, 2000; Bookheimer, 2002; Devlin et al., 2003; Vigneau et al., 2006; Patterson et al., 2007; Binder Desai, 2011; Pulvermüller, 2013.
Theories exist to be tested and disproved, so that more accurate theories can then be devised. What do cognitive psychology and information architecture have in.
Dec 11, 2015 Spreading activation is a model of working memory, also known as short-term memory, that seeks to explain how the mind processes related ideas.
