Structural differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults
| Autor: | Thomas T. Hills, Dirk U. Wulff, Rui Mata |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
Cognitive aging
Longevity PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Developmental Psychology Semantic network Creativity Text mining Memory Humans Semantic memory bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Child Psychology bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Developmental Psychology Aged Semantic Web PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Developmental Psychology|Cognitive Development Multidisciplinary Mental lexicon business.industry PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Cognitive Psychology|Memory PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Cognitive Psychology|Concepts and Categories Semantics bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Psychology|Cognitive Psychology PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Cognitive Psychology|Language PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences bepress|Social and Behavioral Sciences PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Cognitive Psychology business Psychology PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Developmental Psychology|Aging Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Scientific Reports |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-022-11698-4 |
| Popis: | Cognitive science invokes semantic networks to explain diverse phenomena, from memory retrieval to creativity. Research in these areas often assumes a single underlying semantic network that is shared across individuals. Yet, recent evidence suggests that content, size, and connectivity of semantic networks are experience-dependent, implying sizable individual and age-related differences. Here, we investigate individual and age differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults by deriving semantic networks from both fluency and similarity rating tasks. Crucially, we use a megastudy approach to obtain thousands of similarity ratings per individual to allow us to capture the characteristics of individual semantic networks. We find that older adults possess lexical networks with smaller average degree and longer path lengths relative to those of younger adults, with older adults showing less interindividual agreement and thus more unique lexical representations relative to younger adults. Furthermore, this approach shows that individual and age differences are not evenly distributed but, rather, are related to weakly connected, peripheral parts of the networks. All in all, these results reveal the interindividual differences in both the content and the structure of semantic networks that may accumulate across the life span as a function of idiosyncratic experiences. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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