Hello all,
In my research, I am interested in looking into what the study of
memory has to say about the organisation of concepts and mental content
and link it to RT. I would be grateful if anyone could direct me to any
relevant works on this in the cognitive psychology literature? Thanks
in advance for your time.
Regards,
Stavros
Quoting Dan Sperber <dan@sperber.com>:
> 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
>
-- Stavros AssimakopoulosPhD student Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics University of Edinburgh
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