PSY 367 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Lexical Decision Task, Semantic Memory, Semantic Network
27 Mar 2019
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Document Summary
Semantic memory - the neurocognitive memory system that encodes, stores, and retrieves information concerning knowledge of the world. Lexical memory (lexicon) - our mental dictionary; a representational system for the words of our language. Must contain a huge number of items (words and rules of grammar) Access to these items must be extremely fast in order to support normal speech and normal speech comprehension. Associative memory - we represent information in semantic memory in terms of connections among units of information. A node is the unit of memory, which is then connected to other nodes. Semantic network models posit that retrieval takes place when one node is activated based on the input from a cue. Once a node is activated, this activation will spread to existing associated nodes. Spreading activation - refers to the transfer of activation from one node to an associated node.
