Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent results show that 18 months old infants are sensitive to taxonomic relations and that, similarly to adults, these relations are modulated by Inter Stimulus Interval. A very influential proposal in the distributed representations literature explains the impact of ISI on semantic priming as the result of a phenomenon called hysteresis. Here we propose that the same results could also be explained by the opposite phenomenon of adaptation. The existence of two possible explanations calls for more experiments to understand if hysteresis or adaptation can explain the role of ISI on semantic priming.