Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Semantic knowledge can facilitate or distort new memories,depending on their alignment. We aimed to quantifydistortions in memory by examining how categorymembership biases new encoding. Across two experiments,participants encoded and retrieved image-locationassociations on a 2D grid. The locations of images weremanipulated so that most members of a category (e.g. birds)were clustered near each other, but some were in randomlocations. Memory for an item’s location was more precisewhen it was near members of the same category.Furthermore, typical category members’ retrieved locationswere more biased towards their semantic neighbors, relativeto atypical members. This demonstrates that the organizationof semantic knowledge can explain bias in new memories.