Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Semantic fluency tasks have increasingly been used to probethe structure of human memory, adopting methodologies fromthe ecological foraging literature to describe memory as a tra-jectory through semantic space. Clusters of semantically re-lated items are often produced together, and the transitions be-tween these clusters of semantically related items are consis-tent with theories of optimal foraging, where the search pro-cess exhibits a balance between exploration and exploitationbehaviors (Hills, Jones, & Todd, 2012). Here, we use a seman-tic fluency memory task in which subjects recall geographiclocations. For each pairwise transition, we measure tempo-ral, geographic, semantic, lexical, and phonetic distances. Ingeneral, the dimensions are loosely but reliably correlated witheach other. Segmentation of the retrieval sequence into patchessupports the notion that subjects strategically leave patches aswithin-patch resources diminish, but also suggests that sub-jects may shift their attention between different sources of in-formation, perhaps reflecting dynamically changing patch def-initions.