The trajectory of thought: Heavy-tailed distributions in memory foraging promote efficiency.

Free-recall tasks suggest human memory foraging may follow a heavy-tailed distribution, such as a Lévy flight, patch foraging, or area-restricted search – walk procedures that are common in other activities of cognitive agents, such as food foraging in both animals and humans. To date, research mere...

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Publicado en:Memory & Cognition Vol. 48; no. 5; pp. 772 - 788
Autores principales: Patten, K. Jakob, Greer, Katharine, Likens, Aaron D., Amazeen, Eric L., Amazeen, Polemnia G.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Jul2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The trajectory of thought: Heavy-tailed distributions in memory foraging promote efficiency.
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          Patten, K. Jakob
          Greer, Katharine
          Likens, Aaron D.
          Amazeen, Eric L.
          Amazeen, Polemnia G.
        affil:
          College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
          Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
          Department of Biomechanics, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA
      su:
        Cognition
        Memory
        Multidimensional scaling
        Quantitative research
        Task performance
        Reaction time
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        subj:
          Cognition
          Memory
          Multidimensional scaling
          Quantitative research
          Task performance
          Reaction time
      keyword:
        Area-restricted search
        Foraging
        Heavy-tailed distribution
        Lévy distribution
        Memory retrieval
        Patch foraging
        Area-restricted search
        Foraging
        Heavy-tailed distribution
        Lévy distribution
        Memory retrieval
        Patch foraging
      ab: Free-recall tasks suggest human memory foraging may follow a heavy-tailed distribution, such as a Lévy flight, patch foraging, or area-restricted search – walk procedures that are common in other activities of cognitive agents, such as food foraging in both animals and humans. To date, research merely equates memory foraging with hunting in the physical world based on similarities in statistical structure. The current work supports that memory foraging follows a heavy-tailed distribution by using categories with quantitative distances between each item: countries, which have physical distances, and animals, from which cognitive distances can be derived using a multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedure. Likewise, inter-item lag times follow a heavy-tailed distribution. The current work also demonstrates that inter-item distances and times are positively correlated, suggesting the organization of items in memory may be akin to the organization of a physical landscape. Finally, both studies show that participants' original, heavy-tailed lists of countries and animal names produce shorter overall distances traveled than random selection. Human memory foraging follows the same pattern as foraging in the natural world – perhaps because exposure to ecological settings informs our inner cognitive experience – leading to a processing and retrieval time benefit.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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