Douglas L. Nelson

Este artigo estende a hipótese da acessibilidade conceitual proposta por Janczura e Nelson (1999) para a tarefa de produção lingüística e propõe um procedimento alternativo para avaliar a participação dos atributos dos conceitos em julgamentos de tipicidade. Os resultados evidenciaram que diferentes graus de tipicidade não estão relacionados à probabilidade de um atributo ser considerado como presente em um membro de uma categoria, mas podem ser previstos pela força associativa do membro em relação à categoria que pertence. Demonstrou-se, também, que a produção lingüística pode ser determinada em termos da acessibilidade dos membros de categorias na memória e que este resultado é paralelo à tarefa de julgamentos de tipicidade. Ou seja, membros de categorias mais acessíveis na memória são considerados como melhor representantes do que menos acessíveis. Sugere-se que julgamentos de tipicidade são apoiados na memória para a informação categórica. Quanto maior for o acesso ao conhecimento que o indivíduo tiver sobre o membro ou suas características, maior será a percepção de sua representatividade. Propõe-se que, para categorias conhecidas, a tipicidade deveria ser reinterpretada como uma medida de acessibilidade ao invés de representatividade conceitual. This paper extends the accessibility hypotheses proposed by Janczura and Nelson (1999) to linguistic production and presents a procedure for evaluating the participation of attributes in typicality judgments. The results show that different degrees of typicality are not related to the probability of an attribute being considered a part of an exemplar but can be predicted by the strength of association between an instance and its category. It also demonstrates that accuracy in a linguistic production task can be explained in terms of the accessibility of category members in memory. These results parallel typicality judgments. That is, more accessible members in memory are considered better category exemplars. It suggests that memory for category information may underlie typicality judgments. The more a subject knows a category exemplar or its features, the better it is perceived as representing the category. This paper proposes that, for known categories, typicality should be re-interpreted as a measure of category accessibility rather than category representativeness

Recognition success varies with how information is encoded (e.g., level of processing) and with what is already known as a result of past learning (e.g., word frequency). This article presents the results of experiments showing that preexisting connections involving the associates of studied words facilitate their recognition regardless of whether the words are intentionally encoded or are incidentally encoded under semantic or nonsemantic conditions. Words are more likely to be recognized when they have either more resonant connections coming back to them from their associates or more connections among their associates. Such results occur even though attention is never drawn to these associates. Regression analyses showed that these connections affect recognition independently of frequency, so the present results add to the literature showing that prior lexical knowledge contributes to episodic recognition. In addition, equations that use free-association data to derive composite strength indices of resonance and connectivity were evaluated. Implications for theories of recognition are discussed.

Cued recall success varies with what people know and with what they do during an episode. This paper focuses on prior knowledge and disentangles the relative effects of 10 features of words and their relationships on cued recall. Results are reported for correlational and multiple regression analyses of data obtained from free association norms and from 29 experiments. The 10 features were only weakly correlated with each other in the norms and, with notable exceptions, in the experiments. The regression analysis indicated that forward cue-to-target strength explained the most variance, followed by backward target-to-cue strength. Target connectivity and set size explained the next most variance, along with mediated cue-to-target strength. Finally, frequency, concreteness, shared associate strength, and cue set size also contributed significantly to recall. Taken together, indices of prior word knowledge explain 49% of the recall variance. Theoretically driven equations that use free association to predict cued recall were also evaluated. Each equation was designed to condense multiple indices of word interconnectivity into a single predictor.

This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which participants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The findings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrieval task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates and stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability declined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it tended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are requested, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word’s strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each response provided a good fit to the data.

When researchers are interested in the influence of long-term knowledge on performance, printed word frequency is typically the variable of choice. Despite this preference, we know little about what frequency norms measure. They ostensibly index how often and how recently words are experienced, but words appear in context, so frequency potentially reflects an influence of connections with other words. This paper presents the results of a large free association study as well as the results of experiments designed to evaluate the hypothesis that common words have stronger connectionsto other words. The norms indicate that common words tend to be more concrete but they do not appear to have more associates, stronger associates, or more connections among their associates. Two extralist cued recall experiments showed that, with other attributes being equal, high- and low-frequency words were equally effective as test cues. These results suggest that frequency does not achieve its effects because of stronger or greater numbers of connectionsto other words, as implied in SAM. Other results indicated that common words have more connectionsfrom other words, including their associates, and that free association provides a valid index of associative strength.

A model concerning the influence of implicitly activated information on cued recall and recognition is presented. The model assumes that studying a familiar word activates its associates and creates an implicit representation in long-term working memory. Test cues also activate their associates, with memory performance determined by a sampling process that operates on the intersection of information activated by the test cue with information previously activated by the studied word. Successful sampling is enhanced by preexisting connections among the associates of the studied word and by preexisting connections between it and the retrieval cue. However, the usefulness of the implicit representation is reduced by the activation of competing associates and by shifts of attention before testing. Experiments designed to test predictions of the model indicate that the associates of a familiar word can exert a powerful effect on its cued recall and recognition.

Cued recall is strongly affected by the strength of the preexisting connection between the test cue and the information to be recalled, the target. In all past work, preexisting cue-to-target...

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effects of learning conditions and set size on recollective and automatic uses of memory. Words were studied under different conditions and had either small or large preexisting associative sets. Results based on the process-dissociation procedure showed that learning conditions and set size influenced recollective uses of memory, whereas only set size influenced automatic uses. Other results indicated that process-dissociation and direct-indirect test procedures produce similar results. The findings suggest that the relative contributions of recently acquired information and preexisting information depend on how memory is being used. Recollective uses of memory are affected by the nature of recent study and by what such study activates in long-term memory. In contrast, automatic uses of memory are more affected by what the test cue automatically activates than by what has been learned during recent study.