By Kelton O’Grady
“School.”
Your brain has just been primed. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had many things popping into your head. Mental images such as a building, teachers, homework, or even a classroom. (1). The effects on priming are predicted only when assuming that the typical time of activation-spread is in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. Let’s take a second and reflect on how your mind created these images, maybe a web diagram, (like you were taught at a young age to use for essays) connecting all similar ideas once you saw the word. This is one idea I wish I would have used more often my freshman year of college to better understand a wider variety of information and how they connect to many other things in life in different ways.
What is Spreading Activation?
Collins and Loftus proposed a model of spreading activation. Spreading activation is the activation of your working memory, pulling associated concepts from your long-term memory to create a mental construct that creates your internal definition. “Analogous model for the association of ideas, memories, and the like, based on the notion that activation of one item stored in memory travels through associated links to activate another item” (2). In similar terms it can be seen as specific semantic memories that are organized into a larger network that comprises concepts (4). These concepts can be “ affected by a mix of three related sources: The individual’s Prior preferences, beliefs, and experiences” (1). A concept can be represented as a node in a network, with properties of the concept represented as labeled relational links from the node to other concept nodes. The extent or spread of activation is partially dependent on the strength of the initial activation of the node, such that greater initial activation will result in greater spread of activation from that node. The “greater initial activation will result in a greater spread of activation from that initially activated node” (4). These nodes are controlled by whether the prime and the concept are semantically related or semantically unrelated. This can be seen as a negative as well. The weaker the initial activation between nodes would increase your ability to remember related concepts.
The example above could be viewed if you heard the word “red”. This is how your brain connects all similar resources and related concepts that you’ve encountered and stored into your long term memory, along with your semantic memory.
Three major components
Spreading activation has three major properties: It is fast acting (6) (The fast acting helps students with the ability to answer questions on the spot. ); it can occur without intention or conscious awareness (6) (this helps create a clear mental image in your brain); and it does not affect the retrieval of information stored in semantically unrelated to which it has not spread (6) (it wont make you forget or replace other things you’ve learned growing up).
Semantic memory
Semantic memory is a very similar topic compared to spreading activation. Semantic Memory “refers to our general world knowledge that encompasses memory for concepts, facts, and the meanings of words and other symbolic units” (4). This can be viewed in many different acts, relationships between objects or concepts, and many more abstract details allowing for the breakdown of context. For school purposes it would allow for kids to “pick up the basics of language in early childhood to grasp complex ideas and systems in class, in conversations, or while reading books throughout life” (5).
Conclusion
In the blog the model of spreading activation was attempted to be used to take a learning concept to possibly perform limited arrangements. It also can be used to group and connect similar resources together for better understanding and break down. As mentioned before, it’s a psychological web diagram of a node and its associated elements or characteristics, all connected together.
References
- Ghotchkiss. (2015, March 3). The spreading activation model of marketing. Out of My Gord. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://outofmygord.com/2015/03/03/the-spreading-activation-model-of-marketing/.
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Apa Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://dictionary.apa.org/spreading-activation.
- Foster, P. S., Wakefield, C., Pryjmak, S., Roosa, K. M., Branch, K. K., Drago, V., Harrison, D. W., & Ruff, R. (2017, September). Spreading activation in nonverbal memory networks. Brain informatics. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5563298/.
- Semantic memory. obo. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199828340/obo-9780199828340-0231.xml.
- Semantic memory | psychology Today. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/memory/semantic-memory.
- Neely, James H. “Semantic Priming and Retrieval from Lexical Memory: Roles of Inhibitionless Spreading Activation and Limited-Capacity Attention.” Journal of experimental psychology. General 106.3 (1977): 226–254. Web.