Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people search their memory when answering a question? To examine how this process relates to the degree of constraint imposed by a question, we asked 329 participants to generate sequences of responses while answering either more constrained trivia questions or broader category-based questions. Across both tasks, answer generation reflected common retrieval dynamics: participants were more likely to produce generally accessible answers, and transitions were strongly shaped by similarity to previously generated responses. However, answers generated in response to trivia questions were more strongly aligned with the semantic content of the question itself. Analyses of response times also revealed a dissociation in retrieval dynamics while answering specific questions: answers semantically similar to prior responses were generated more quickly, whereas answers more closely aligned with the question were generated more slowly. This pattern suggests that more specific questions engage an additional control process that intermittently redirects memory search toward the question. The pattern does not arise from a random walk through semantic space with constant transition probabilities, but instead supports a view of memory search as a foraging process, in which search alternates between associative small steps (local exploitation) and question-directed big jumps (wider exploration) as the ease of finding a local transition varies.