Semantic Association Experiments

When meaning is attached to words or sequences of speech sounds, young children begin to develop semantic knowledge. Children develop semantic knowledge through their experiences in varied environmental contexts that foster concept development. Semantic development is impacted by direct experiences because these experiences occur from birth on,

In each trial, the participants were presented with a sequence of words on the left side of the window. Each word was presented for one and a half seconds. After all the words were presented, the response buttons were presented on the right side of window. These response buttons were labeled with words from the sequence along with new distractor words that were not part of the sequence. The goal of the participants was to click on the response buttons and identify all the words that were part of the sequence. The independent variable for this study was the types of words that were presented on the test (response buttons). The dependent variable was the percentage of each types of items reported.

The hypothesis that in Experiment 1, words at the beginning and end of a list would be better remembered while in Experiment 2, words at the beginning would be better remembered, was partially rejected, while still being partially true. The hypothesis that a delay would in fact make a difference was supported. In both tests, words in the first third seemed to be remembered by significantly more of the participants. However despite the predictions, words in the last third of experiment 1 seemed to be not significantly more than words in the middle third. experiment2 did seem to fit with the hypothesis, as the words at the start seemed to be higher than the rest, but there was a absurdity on word 16, “ocean,” which was recalled 7 out of the 9 times. Apart from this, experiment 2 seemed to support the hypothesis.

Annotated Bibliography Less Than Human: The Psychology of Cruelty, by David L. Smith, article excerpt, St. Martin Press LLC, 2011. David Livingstone Smith in his article titled, “ Less Than Human: The Psychology of Cruelty,” he claims that defining and describing dehumanization is key to understanding how people are capable of doing horrible things to others by beginning to demean them and thinking of them as animals and supports his claim by giving evidence of the consequences of those who have been dehumanized and treated as subhumans. Smith’s purpose is to persuade the reader to believe that demeaning and treating others as less than human makes anyone capable of killing or harming others in order to make many aware of the dangers of viewing

Interpretation bias has been found in studies using homophone, homonym, and the word-stem completion task. For example, Pincus et al. (1994) found individuals with chronic pain made more pain-related

Further examples of the significance of semantic processing and prior learning can be seen in the work of De Groot (1966; as cited in Gross et al; 2000:15). De Groot (1966: Ibid)

Wittenbrink, Judd, and Park (1997) studied eighty-eight people from the University of Colorado, who were in a psychology course, in order to receive points for their class. African Americans were not included. Caucasian American participants had to do three irrelevant assignments. One involved classifying to which race people belonged to according to first names. In this way, a connection with race categories was reinforced and was used as group primes. Following this, they had them do a response time assignment (out of awareness procedure), where they were asked if different strings of letters on the computer were a word or were not a word this was part of the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) (Wittenbrink, Judd, and Park, 1997). Before presenting the words

Recent periods of social progress and development have seen many concepts and constructs receive widespread attention to what can be described as negative behaviours and one concept and area in particular to receive this attention is abuse. Any response to find a solution to a problem whilst remaining effective and appropriate can experience various complications as there can be an inability to provide a clear and detailed definition of what it actually constitutes, provision of evidence that remains compelling and substantial and taking on board the cultural, social and political considerations and factors that are relevant to the society pertinent to the

These five target words, 'cruelty ', 'abuse ', 'neglect ', 'maltreatment ', and 'Ill-treatment ', are treated differently from one another. The words 'ill treatment ' and 'maltreatment ' are rarely associated within this group of words (EAT.ac.uk). These 'missing ' associations seem to degrade the severity of these words as a whole. These words and words associated with them define the lives of over 16000 children in care across Scotland. None the less, some words seem to have a greater impact than others; however, the word 'abuse ' still holds a higher air of severity and may still be associated with sexual abuse rather than all other types of abuse. 'Cruelty ' seems to be seen as a

When the research participant in Test C1 focused on the way the words look, she recalled a lesser number of words compared to Test C2. The result was consistent with the researcher participant`s performance. In Test C2, the research participant used the model of the semantic network to connect the words by imagining that she is on the balcony eating a cookie and typing a story written by her about a farmer that found a treasure an alligator attacked him, so he killed it by a fork. Whereas in Test C1, she tried to combining the words in common groups to remember it. As a conclusion, the more meaningful the word is; the deeper the level of processing it is, and the easier to recall

An iPhone app helped London scientists get a better understanding of Alzheimer's. A game called Sea Hero Quest centered around a sailor's memories at sea could be the first step in testing for dementia. By having the player try and navigate through buoys and other obstacles researchers were able to measure their sense of direction. From the game they were able to conclude that sense of direction being to decrease after you're done being a teenager and players from Nordic countries, where better health is more common, were better navigators. Unfortunately disorientation is a sign of dementia and Alzheimer's, but using the player's data they can spot early signs of dementia. The use of similar Alzheimer's diagnosis methods in the future seems

Using paired wordlists of nouns, Bower and Gordon demonstrated this in their 1970 experiment. In their study, they had undergraduate students learn paired wordlists by one of four methods – rehearsal of the two words; reading a sentence in which one of the words acted upon the other (i.e. “The boy hit the ball.”); creating a sentence which linked the two words (i.e. “Nancy threw her bag on the table.”) or creating a mental image of the two words together (i.e. imagining a basket of flowers) (Bower & Gordon, 1970). Results found that students who employed imagery did better on recalling the word pairs in comparison to other methods and those who utilized rehearsal had the lowest recall rate out of the four groups (Bower & Gordon, 1970).

Multiple studies have been conducted that investigate false memory in humans focusing on word recall, processing and retention interval, and auditory imaging. Roediger and McDermott (1995) suggest that individuals who participated in their study are more likely to recall the critical words and lures if the list of words presented were closely associated to them. Critical lures are the tendency to recall words that are associated with presented information (Kreiner, Price, Gross, Appleby, 2004). Roediger and McDermott (1995) also suggest that the same individuals will be more familiar with the critical lures compared to the words actually presented (Roediger, McDermott 1995), while other studies suggest similar conclusions. This paper will discuss the effect of false memory with word association, the ability to retain the words, and auditory learning and testing with research done by Roediger, McDermott, Gallo, Pilotti, Jacoby, and Thapar.

This study is a conceptualized replication of the Howes and Solomon (1951) experiment investigating word accuracy and word frequency in short duration trials. It is hypothesized that words that appear more often in printed text (easier to access in the lexicon) will be more accurately identified rather than words that appear less commonly. A total of 83 participants in the study were presented with words taken from the Throndike-Lorge database. The words were presented for one second with a six second rest in the middle. This was done sixty times and the results suggest a moderate strong relationship between word accuracy and frequency. Though there are multiple factors that may have influenced these results.

Throughout history, people have worked on ways to try to define social problems. The social learning theory is defined as people viewing conflicts/ problems as undesirable (Chegg, 2016). The biggest difficulty with social problems is that not everyone looks at them in the same way. For example, fighting in public can be seen as disturbance to the peace to some and others view it as proving one’s self. A social problem that is taken, as a very serious issue is abuse, even though people still have different opinions about what abuse is. The current definition of abuse is the treatment to a person or animal with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly. Although abuse has a solid meaning, it can be looked at differently depending