Organizational Effects of Semantic Relations

TLDR: This chapter describes the organizational effects of semantic relations, a central concept of the recent memory research in psychology that stands for assumed connections between memory units.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter describes the organizational effects of semantic relations. The concept of semantic relation is a central concept of the recent memory research in psychology. Similar as the classical concept of association, the term semantic relation stands for assumed connections between memory units. But semantic relations cover more connections between single memory units. They are the result of abstraction processes and they reflect classes of real relations between classes of objects in memory. Semantic relations are differentiable memory contents. The relation between sky and blue retrievable from memory is qualitatively different from the relation between playing and ball, the connection between tree and plant is different from the one between hunter and shooting. These qualitative differences of semantic relations are the cognitive basis of their classification. There are various proposals for the classification of semantic relations ranging from the assumption of four basic binary relations up to a list of more than 20 relations for determining the structure of semantic memory but these classifications are validated by empirical data.