Modelling the acitivation of words in human memory: The spreading activation, spooky-activation-at-a-distance and the entanglement models compared

Abstract

Modelling how a word is activated in human memory is an important requirement for determining the probability of recall of a word in an extra-list cueing experiment. The spreading activation, spooky-action-at-a-distance and entanglement models have all been used to model the activation of a word. Recently a hypothesis was put forward that the mean activation levels of the respective models are as follows: Spreading ≤ Entanglment ≤ Spooking-action-at-a-distance This article investigates this hypothesis by means of a substantial empirical analysis of each model using the University of South Florida word association, rhyme and word norms. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.