PSYC 2650 Lecture Notes - Spreading Activation, Lexical Decision Task, Knowledge Representation And Reasoning

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2650
• Professor: Anneke Olthof

Document Summary

Long-term memory is enormous in size, and yet we typically extract information from it extremely quickly and effortlessly. For instance, ambiguous sentences like this one are understood by the automatic application of background knowledge. Much of this chapter explores a single idea: that memory connections are much more than retrieval paths. In other words, knowledge is represented via a vast network of connections and associations between all of the information you know. Spreading activation is the process through which activation travels from one node to another, via the associative links. As each node becomes activated, it serves as a source of further activation, spreading onward through the network. Similar to neurons, nodes have activation levels and fire a signal if the input stimulating them summates to reach threshold. We have seen this notion of networks and spreading activation earlier in the course in our discussion of feature nets. Networks suggest an explanation for why hints help us remember.