semantic memory Flashcards
What is semantic memory?
The part of declarative (explicit) long-term memory that stores knowledge of general facts and concepts of the world.
What are the building blocks of semantic memory?
- Concept
- Category
- Propositions
- Schemas
- Stereotypes
Define ‘concept’.
A mental representation of a category of objects.
Define ‘category’.
A set or class of objects that belong together.
What is the common-feature approach?
Concepts are defined by essential, common features shared across all concepts of the same category.
What are ‘fuzzy boundaries’ in concept categorization?
The grey zone of transition that exists between categories, making it difficult to define concepts based on essential features.
What is a prototype in the context of categorization?
A central description or conceptual store representing the category, stored in long-term memory.
What is ‘family resemblance’?
A high level of match between an item and its prototype.
What does the typicality effect refer to?
People are faster to decide that a typical member belongs to a particular category compared to a non-typical member.
True or False: Not all concepts have clear prototypes.
True
What is the exemplar approach?
Instead of storing a single prototype, we store examples (exemplars) of the category in long-term memory.
What does the knowledge-based approach to categorization emphasize?
Categories are based on knowledge about causal, functional, or structural properties of things in the world.
What is the hub-and-spoke model?
A model in which each spoke is a modality-specific region providing contextual variability, and each concept has a hub that integrates all information stored in the spokes.
What are the theoretical approaches to semantic organization?
- Hierarchical
- Network-based
In a hierarchical structure, what is the top-level category?
The most abstract category, such as a type of furniture.
What is a limitation of the three-level hierarchy in categorization?
It is too inflexible and arbitrary.
What did Collin and Loftus (1975) argue about semantic memory?
Semantic memory is organized based on semantic relatedness in a form of a semantic network.
What are ‘nodes’ and ‘links’ in a semantic network?
- Nodes = concepts
- Links = connect related concepts
What is the word association task used for?
To find out which concepts are related to each other.
Fill in the blank: Semantic vectors imply that the meaning of words can be inferred from the _______.
other words that co-occur with it in a large corpora of text.
What is the limitation of exemplar theories?
They assume no abstraction of concepts.
What is the main conclusion about concept formation and categorization?
They are complex cognitive processes involved in our semantic memory representation.
What is semantic similarity?
The meaning of words can be inferred from the other words that co-occur with it in a large corpora of text
Usually written and from the Internet
What is Simlex-999?
A human-generated dataset commonly used to evaluate computational models of language and meaning
Source: https://fh295.github.io/simlex.html
