{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-interaction-of-memory-and-attention-in","title":"The Interaction of Memory and Attention in Novel Word Generalization: A Computational Investigation","arxiv_id":"1602.05944","date":"2016-02-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Erin Grant","Aida Nematzadeh","Suzanne Stevenson"],"abstract":"People exhibit a tendency to generalize a novel noun to the basic-level in a\nhierarchical taxonomy -- a cognitively salient category such as \"dog\" -- with\nthe degree of generalization depending on the number and type of exemplars.\nRecently, a change in the presentation timing of exemplars has also been shown\nto have an effect, surprisingly reversing the prior observed pattern of\nbasic-level generalization. We explore the precise mechanisms that could lead\nto such behavior by extending a computational model of word learning and word\ngeneralization to integrate cognitive processes of memory and attention. Our\nresults show that the interaction of forgetting and attention to novelty, as\nwell as sensitivity to both type and token frequencies of exemplars, enables\nthe model to replicate the empirical results from different presentation\ntimings. Our results reinforce the need to incorporate general cognitive\nprocesses within word learning models to better understand the range of\nobserved behaviors in vocabulary acquisition.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05944v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05944v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-interaction-of-memory-and-attention-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/eringrant/novel_word_generalization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}