Exploring Integrated Co-occurrent and Semantic Mechanisms for Long Term Memory Retrieval

Semantic and co-occurrent memory associations aid the retrieval of relevant memory elements from long term memory but little is understood about how semantics and co-occurrence interact to facilitate retrieval. This paper explores the relationship between these associations via eleven potential relationships between semantics and co-occurrence in a Bayesian computational memory model. We assessed the performance of the candidate mechanisms using two linguistic tasks - the Word Sense Disambiguation task and the Remote Associates Test. The most successful mechanisms use co-occurrent associations to modulate semantic associations by removing or adding associations to the retrieval context or pool of candidate memory elements for retrieval. Features of the demonstrated interaction between semantic and co-occurrence are discussed in light of their psychological implications, consistent with recent experimental work in memory retrieval.