Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In an attractor model of semantic memory, semantic similarity is determined by degree of featural overlap. In contrast, in spreading activation theory, two concepts are similar if they share features or if they are linked to the same superordinate category node. We present an attractor network model of computing word meaning and use it to simulate the data of McRae and Boisvert (in press), who found that short SOA semantic similarity priming directly depends on degree of featural overlap. The two accounts of semantic similarity are then contrasted in a human experiment. In support of attractor networks, priming effects were determined by featural overlap, and no evidence was found for priming through a purported superordinate node. It is concluded that lexical concepts are not represented as static nodes in a hierarchical system.