Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior knowledge has long been known to influence retention of newly experienced information. In particular, known semantic associations across items facilitate subsequent memory for these items, and this effect has been shown to increase with measures of semantic relatedness. In the field of categories and concepts, the processing of taxonomic (e.g., cup-fork, dog-bird) versus thematic (e.g., cup-drink, dog-leash) conceptual relations can be differentiated at the behavioral and neural levels. However, the effects of these distinct conceptual relations on memory remain unresolved. The current study used a stimulus set consisting of thematic, taxonomic, and unrelated noun-noun word pairs, to shed light on this issue. Our results indicate that pairs with thematic relations lead to improved cued memory performance, followed by taxonomic relations, and finally unrelated pairs. This study provides evidence that conceptual relations differ in the extent to which they facilitate cued memory performance.