Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates the interaction between semantic relatedness and goals or task on memory retrieval. We used varied tasks and concepts to explore how task influences how different kinds of semantic relatedness influences semantic processing. Our findings reveal a task-dependent interaction with semantic relatedness. Specifically, in similarity judgement tasks (experiments 1a and 1b), participants' ratings closely aligned with taxonomic relatedness, influenced by abstract visual and linguistic similarity dimensions. In discrimination tasks (experiments 2a and 2b), where participants distinguished a target from a semantically related distractor, visual characteristics explained a greater amount of variance. These results suggest semantic memory representations are dynamic and task-dependent, supporting theories of a distributed semantic memory system.