Journal ArticleDOI
Subjective hierarchies in spatial memory.
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TLDR
These findings indicate that spatial memories have a hierarchical component, even when physical and perceptual boundaries are nonexistent, and supports spreading-activation theories of retrieval but provides evidence against several "non-spreading-activation" theories.Abstract:
Two experiments investigated the structure of spatial memories. Subjects learned locations of objects in spatial layouts (Experiment 1) or locations of object names on maps (Experiment 2). Physical and perceptual boundaries were absent in these spatial arrays. Subjects then participated in three tasks: item recognition, in which the variable of interest was spatial priming; free and cued recall; and Euclidean distance estimation. Ordered-tree analysis of individual subjects' recall protocols produced hierarchical trees consistent with regularities in output order. Spatial priming and distance estimations depended on whether pairs of objects appeared in the same subtree or in different subtrees. These findings indicate that spatial memories have a hierarchical component, even when physical and perceptual boundaries are nonexistent. Priming also increased with depth of clustering in ordered trees. This result supports spreading-activation theories of retrieval but provides evidence against several "non-spreading-activation" theories. Language: enread more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
What memory is for.
TL;DR: Practical work in cognitive science and empirical work in memory and language comprehension are reviewed that suggest that it may be possible to investigate connections between topics as disparate as infantile amnesia and mental-model theory.
Journal ArticleDOI
Categories and particulars: prototype effects in estimating spatial location.
TL;DR: The proposed model has broad implications; notably, it has the potential to explain biases of the sort described in psychophysics as well as symmetries in similarity judgments, without positing distorted representations of physical scales.
Book ChapterDOI
Cognitive maps, cognitive collages, and spatial mental models
TL;DR: Cognitive collages are consistent with research demonstrating systematic errors in memory and judgment of environmental knowledge and two other metaphors for mental representations are proposed and supported.
BookDOI
Spatial Cognition II
TL;DR: This paper posits the usefulness of mental shifts of scale and perspective in thinking and communicating about spatial relations, and describes two experimental techniques for researching such cognitive activities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Modularity and development: the case of spatial reorientation
Linda Hermer,Elizabeth S. Spelke +1 more
TL;DR: These findings support broader proposals concerning the domain specificity of humans' core cognitive abilities, the conservation of cognitive abilities across related species and over the course of human development, and the developmental processes by which core abilities are extended to permit more flexible, uniquely human kinds of problem solving.
References
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Journal Article
The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
TL;DR: The theory of information as discussed by the authors provides a yardstick for calibrating our stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of our subjects and provides a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions.
Book
The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information
TL;DR: The theory provides us with a yardstick for calibrating the authors' stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of their subjects, and the concepts and measures provided by the theory provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions.
Journal ArticleDOI
A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing
TL;DR: The present paper shows how the extended theory can account for results of several production experiments by Loftus, Juola and Atkinson's multiple-category experiment, Conrad's sentence-verification experiments, and several categorization experiments on the effect of semantic relatedness and typicality by Holyoak and Glass, Rips, Shoben, and Smith, and Rosch.