The interrelationship of taxonomic categories.

Abstract

College students from two universities performed a sorting task with taxonomic categories. Sorting norms for both subject groups and hierarchical relations among the categories were determined and compared.Human memory is often thought of as a multitude of associatively related units. Accessibility to any unit is supposedly provided by a somewhat well-defined and permanent semantic organization. Several theoretical accounts have emphasized the hierarchical character of this organizational process (Bousfield & Cohen, 1953;Collins & Quillian, 1969;Mandler, 1968). According to these approaches, subordinate units are related through a superordinate, and lower order superordinates are linked through a higher order superordinate.The purpose of this study was to gather normative data bearing on the hierarchical organization of semantic memory. A procedure described by Miller (1969) was used to determine the hierarchical scheme among units. Obtaining information from students of two college campuses promised to broaden the generality and usefulness of the findings. METHOD SubjectsOne-hundred and forty-seven Marshall University (MU) undergraduates and 95 Ohio State University (OSU) undergraduates participated in this study while enrolled in an introductory psychology course. MaterialsThe 56 category names used by Battig and Montague (1969) were typed separately on index

Automatic information processing and high-performance skills: Principles of consistency, part-task training, context, retention, and complex task performance.

“…(a) semantically unrelated categories (Collen et al, 1975), (b) exemplar length between four and seven letters, and (c) target exemplars of high to moderately high production frequency (high item dominance) ranking (Battig & Montague, 1969).…”

“…The target categories were not the same across experiments (although there was overlap), but were chosen using the same criterion (i.e., less than 20 percent related) from the list compiled by Collen et al (1975).…”

“…Stimuli. Memory-set items were the semantically unrelated categories (Collen, Wickens, & Daniele, 1975) …”

“…Six categories were used for the target sets and eight different categories were used for the distractor sets (the stimulus items were either targets or distractors; i.e., consistently mapped). The target set items consisted of words from the semantically unrelated categories (Collen et a!., 1975) To train subjects to their visual search limit, an adaptive, multiple-frame procedure (Hodge & Fisk, 1989) was used.…”

On the locus of the Tulving retrograde amnesia effect

“…Each list contained 15 independent categories, as indicated by the taxonomic category ratings of Collen, Wickens, and Daniele (1975). The words for each category were obtained from the norms of Battig and Montague (1969).…”