Luis asks an interesting question to which RT
does not, and is not meant to, provide a direct
answer. The study of memory is a well-developed
field within cognitive psychology and
neuroscience and what we should aim at is
fruitful interaction with it. This goes both
ways. Whatever is found about memory is relevant
to us because it determines accessibility which
affects relevance. Conversely, the Cognitive
Principle (human cognition is geared towards the
maximization of relevance) has implications for
memory: we should in particular expect memory to
be so organised as to favor the activation of
what is likely to be relevant to ongoing
cognitive processes. Chunking in particular (and
a concept is chunk - which may itself have
sub-parts) should reflect probabilities of
various pieces of information being relevant in
the same contexts. This in turn is likely to be
related to objective properties of the world and
of its affordances for humans. The idea of
spreading activation is one that fits
particularly well with ideas in RT, since it
allows for the effect of various contextual
factors of relevance to interact and to give
greater accessibility to pieces of informations
linked to more factors. Luis raises a more
specific question: do we need two levels of
networking: one intra-conceptual, the other
inter-concepts, so to speak. This seems too rigid
at first blush, if only because much of the
information within a conceptual entry links it to
other concepts, so how would you keep levels
separate? In fact, one classical way to look at
conceptual entries is to think of them as the
network of links of a given node. This
alternative by itself might be too loose. Imagine
as a third, more attractive alternative a single
network with differences in thresholds of
activation defining distinct areas and sub-areas
corresponding to concepts, for instance. But the
right description is for the (neuro-)psychology of memory to discover.
Cheers, Dan
At 06:19 24/01/2006, you wrote:
>Hello, a question:
>
>
>
>I understand that in the RT framework some form
>of a spreading activation model of memory is
>accepted, so that nodes can be said to be linked
>with other nodes containing information in an
>intricate complex system. I also understand that
>three types of information can be stored in a
>conceptual address or node: the logical entry,
>the encyclopedia entry, and the lexical entry.
>However, my question pertains specifically to
>the information stored intrinsically in a
>particular conceptual address or node. If a
>spreading activation model is used to link nodes
>and other information together, then can it also
>be said that there is another deeper level
>network of spreading activation taking place
>intrinsically in a particular node which links
>information from a logical entry, encyclopedic
>entry, and lexical entry? Perhaps due to the
>inferential nature of the logical entry it may
>not be linked to a network at all (I don’t
>know). At any rate, to be more precise, what I
>am really pondering is if the information in the
>encyclopedic entry (a vast store of potential
>information) is also stored and organized
>intrinsically in a particular node in some form
>of a spreading activation network? Are there
>actually two layers of spreading activation
>networks at work inside the mind? Is there a
>spreading activation network linking the nodes,
>and another (perhaps more complicated) spreading
>activation network linking the information of
>the encyclopedic entry specifically inside a
>node? This may be something well known to
>others, but I am not familiar with this. Perhaps
>someone can direct me to any psycholinguistic research addressing this issue.
>
>
>
>Does anyone have any comment on this?
>
>
>
>Greatly appreciated,
>
>-Luis C. Reyes
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