Morais,A.
Olsson,H.
Schooler,L.J.

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small-world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale-free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual's semantic memory.

Morais, A. S., Olsson, H., & Schooler, L. J. (2013). Mapping the structure of semantic memory. Cognitive Science, 37, 125-145. doi:10.1111/cogs.12013 (Full text)

Publication year	2013
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12013 View
Categories:	LawMemory
Keywords:	individual semantic networkspower lawsscale-freesmall-worldssnowball sampling