Level 1
What is semantic memory?
Our general knowledge about the world. ( ex: Disney World is in Orlando) Categories & Concepts.
A category is
a group of objects that belong together
The Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been used to measure attitudes and stereotypes, is based on the principle that people can
mentally pair-related words much more easily and quickly than they can pair unrelated words
How is Semantic Memory stored?
4 theories: Feature Comparison, Prototypes, Exemplars, Network Models.
The category "car" is
a basic-level category
According to the ACT-R model (Anderson and his colleagues, 2004)
the meaning of a sentence is represented by a propositional network
What is a Category
set of objects that belong together (fruit: banana, orange)
According to network models of semantic memory
when the name of a concept is mentioned, the node representing that concept is activated
In a study supporting a constructive model of memory, people heard a series of
sentences about the same theme (e.g., "The girl next door broke the window on the porch"). This study revealed that
people integrate related information in order to construct larger ideas
What is Feature Comparison Theory?
Memories are stored based on lists made up of certain features or characteristics. (ex: "Cats" list : fur, 4 legs, meow, tail. A Dog may fit 3 of them but not all so not a cat!)
In the name parallel distributed processing approach, the word distributed refers to
the distribution of information across many locations in the brain
Family resemblance means that
each example shares at least one attribute in common with some other example of the concept
An important feature of semantic memory is that
it allows us to draw inferences that extend beyond the information supplied in the original stimulus
If you are buying tickets at a box-office or eating at a restaurant, you expect certain events to occur in a certain order. This sequence of events is known as
a script
In a typical study about schemas or scripts, people view a common scene, such as a professor's office or a doctor's office. When they were subsequently asked to recall objects that they had seen in the office
they often incorrectly remembered seeing objects that are typically found in offices but were not in the viewed office