375: Semantic Memory Pt1

SEMANTIC MEMORIES

So far we have talked about episodic memories which are memories about events in your life.  Semantic memories are memories for factual types of information such as "who was the first president of the United States."  We all know who it is but we don't have a specific event in memory of when we learned this information.

ORGANIZATION OF SEMANTIC MEMORY

How do you organize your memories?  Is it nice and organized or maybe more like a bunch of random piles of information.  Theories of how we organize this need to account for accessing relevant information when crucial information is not stored.

Something very impressive is that we can use our semantic memories in novel ways.  For example if we were to drop an egg off of the Eifel Tower would it break?  Well we know that it would break because we can use other semantic information that we have and use it in a flexible way.

CATEGORIZATION

1. Categorization
1. Semantic Memory
1. Category VS Exemplar: group of objects that have something in common VS particular instance of a category
2. Concept: Mental representation to compare to novel object
3. Generalization: ability to gather info about one exemplar and compare it to another
4. Typicality effect
1. Effects how quickly you categorize and how you reason about things
2. How do you know if something is typical?
5. Typicality - levels
1. Basic level (e.g., "Maple")
1. most inclusive but members still share most of their features
2. Superordinate level (e.g., "Trees")
1. category is one level more abstruse; winged or not, tailed or not, warm blooded or not...
3. Subordinate level (e.g., "Sugar Maple")
1. categories are less abstract than basic level
6. Some people argue that the basic level is psychologically privileged.
1. This means that when we are thinking about cars what we imagine is on a basic level