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Question -

Discuss the hierarchical organisation in long-term memory?



Answer -

  • Allan Collins and Ross Quillian suggested that knowledge in long-term memory is organized in terms of concepts, categories and images and are organised hierarchically and assumes a network structure. Elements of this structure are called nodes.
  • Nodes are concepts While connections between nodes are labelled relationships, which indicate category membership or concept attributes.
  • According to this view, we can store all knowledge at a certain level that ‘applies to all the members of a category without having to repeat that information at the lower levels in the hierarchy’.
  • This ensures a high degree of cognitive economy, which means maximum and efficient use of the capacity of long-term memory with minimum effort.
  • Images: An image is a concrete form of representation which directly conveys the perceptual attributes of an object.
  • All concrete objects generate images and the knowledge related to them is encoded both verbally as well as visually. This is known as dual coding hypothesis, originally proposed by Paivio. Such information can be recalled with greater ease.
  • According to this hypothesis, concrete nouns and information related to concrete objects are images.
  • Information related to abstract concepts assume a verbal and a descriptive code. For example, if you are asked to describe a bird, the first thing that happens is that an image of a bird is generated and based on this image, you describe a bird. But, on the other hand, the meanings of concepts like ‘truth’ or ‘honesty’ will not have such accompanying images.

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