When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children's Co-Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm.

This study provides the first evidence that in children the co-activation of related items depends on their relational strength in semantic memory. Participants (N = 84, age range: 3-9 years) were asked to identify a target (e.g., bone) amid distractors. Children's responses were slowed down by the presence of a related distractor (e.g., puppy) relative to unrelated distractors (e.g., flower)-suggesting that children co-activated related items upon hearing the name of the target. Importantly, the degree of this co-activation was predicted by the strength of the target-distractor relation, such that distractors more strongly related to the targets slowed down children to a larger extent. These findings have important implications for understanding how organized semantic knowledge affects other cognitive processes across development. PMID: 31204802 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Cognitive Science - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research