Philine Link, Diego Frassinelli, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Dotlačil
{"title":"The Connection Between Associative Memory and Semantic Similarity: Evidence From Fan Experiments and Distributional Models","authors":"Philine Link, Diego Frassinelli, Leendert van Maanen, Jakub Dotlačil","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70210","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70210","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Memory retrieval is prone to interference: when multiple concepts in memory match a given retrieval cue, recall becomes slower and less accurate. This has repeatedly been studied in fan effect experiments in which participants learn facts that are combinations of person–location pairs. These experiments manipulate the fan of a concept—the number of facts linked to it—establishing interference. The standard theoretical account invokes spreading activation: when a cue is linked to multiple memory traces, activation spreads across them, reducing the target's retrievability. We study whether this spreading activation is triggered only by explicitly learned associations or also by semantic similarity. We show that spreading activation in the rational analysis of memory is pointwise mutual information and that similarity in at least some vector-space models of meaning approximates the same quantity, which makes such models potentially formal implementations of the rational analysis of memory. In two behavioral experiments using Dutch-language stimuli, we first replicate the classical fan effect. Experiment 2 tests whether this interference effect can be elicited through semantic similarity alone, using pretrained word embeddings to construct semantic fans. We find that items in higher semantic-fan conditions are retrieved more slowly and less accurately, mirroring patterns from Experiment 1. In a simulation, we show that similarity in embedding spaces predicts retrieval difficulty in a manner consistent with rational models of memory. Together, these results formally connect vector-space models of meaning with the rational analysis of memory, and demonstrate that semantic similarity is sufficient to produce associative interference in memory.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"50 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13111979/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Development of Event Segmentation in Language and Cognition: Evidence From Dwell Times and Eye Movements","authors":"Bilge Tınaz, Ercenur Ünal","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70212","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70212","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To navigate in and communicate about the continuous world we experience, our minds segment this experience into discrete event units. Yet, languages differ in how they package core aspects of events into linguistic units. Here, we ask how event units in language and cognition relate to each other, and how this relation might change during language acquisition. To do so, we focus on motion events and compare child and adult speakers of Turkish—a verb-framed language encoding motion events in multiple linguistic units with distinct units for each path segment. In a linguistic task, there were systematic differences in the number of linguistic units used for expressing motion paths when describing events with versus without direction changes in adults and to a lesser extent in 5-year-olds but not in 4-year-olds. In a non-linguistic eye-tracked dwell-time task, both children and adults had similar visual attention profiles for events with and without direction changes. These findings indicate that although linguistic event units become increasingly language-specific with age, cognitive event units remain stable and independent of linguistic encoding. These findings show that people flexibly shift between different levels of granularity when segmenting events in language and cognition. Further, this flexibility seems to emerge in children as young as 4 to 5 years old.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"50 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13110846/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to “Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures”","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70213","DOIUrl":"10.1111/cogs.70213","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Avcı, C., Özer, D., Eskenazi, T., & Göksun, T. (2025). Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures. <i>Cognitive Science</i>, <i>49</i>(11): e70144. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70144</p><p>In the author section, the affiliation of Terry Eskenazi “Department of Psychology, Bilkent University” was incorrect. This should have been “Department of Psychology, Koç University.”</p><p> </p><p>We apologize for this error.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"50 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70213","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147785868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
