The role of situational information in conceptual knowledge
Abstract
This thesis investigated the influence of situational knowledge on the performance of
two common tasks; category member generation under a free-emission procedure and
the judgement of similarity between two items using rating scales. In both tasks, self-report
protocols were used to identify the strategies that people seemed to be using to
complete the tasks. The main goal was to identify the role of situational knowledge in
the organisation of semantic memory. Traditional models would not predict a role for
situational knowledge in either of the target tasks. In the category member generation
studies (Chapter 2) participants frequently instantiated situations or perspectives to
cue retrieval of category members for both taxonomic and ad hoc categories. Chapter
3 investigated the factors that determine subjective similarity: category type,
typicality, context and presence or absence of self-report. The quantitative data
analysis showed the need for careful qualifications to previous claims concerning the
effect of context on similarity (Barsalou, 1982). Specifically, ad hoc category
members were rated more similar with context only when judgements were made
without self-report and when items were relatively typical. Self-report protocols
showed that co-occurrence of items in a situation frequently entered into judgements
of similarity. Chapter 4 investigated the role of events in determining the strength of
this 'thematic' similarity. Individual indices of association strength between the items
and an event were shown to predict similarity ratings - thus confirming that thematic
similarity is driven, at least partially, by the association of items to common settings.
The findings lend empirical weight to theoretical positions that present memory for
situational information as an integral part of conceptual knowledge. This approach
may underpin a new direction for research into concepts in both normal and clinical
adult populations.
Publication date
2004Published version
https://doi.org/10.18745/th.14248https://doi.org/10.18745/th.14248