ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2021
Semantic memory: A review of methods, models, and current challenges.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 80 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
80 citing papers in PubMed, 290 citations in OpenAlex.
- Linguistics and human brain: a perspective of computational neuroscience.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2026Review
- Free recall of semantically related words reveals similarity structure.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Lexical Search and Retrieval in Aphasia: A Computational Analysis of Semantic Fluency.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Semantic properties and categorization norms for the 260 Snodgrass and Vanderwart objects: A 45-year conceptual update to a classic set.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- How Knowledge Structure and Form Shape Scientific Divergent Thinking: Evidence from Semantic Network Analysis and the Scientific Divergent Application Task.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- A neurocognitive interactive activation model of semantic priming in lexical decisions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Probabilistic modeling of the semantic fluency task with extended Markov networks.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Instance memory models as a general computational framework for exploring language processing: bringing the lexicon to life.Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal · 2026Article
- Centroid analysis: Inferring concept representations from open-ended word responses.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Image type reveals evolutionarily shaped perceptual and conceptual mechanisms of pareidolia.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Zero-shot pseudowords memorability via representational content analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- AI-Enhanced Semantic Feature Norms for 786 Concepts.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Semantic Memory Structure and Self-Evaluation of Creativity: Evidence Across Tasks and Dimensions.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Context Size and Set Size Effects: The Relevance of Specific Cues When Searching Long-Term Memory.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Associative and categorical priming in a word-picture paradigm: a diffusion model analysis.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Multimodal prior knowledge determines false memory formation.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1854 object concepts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Prefrontal and Cerebellar Contributions to Semantic Memory Retrieval.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Beyond discretization: why cognitive science should embrace continuity.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
20 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Adult semantic memory has been traditionally conceptualized as a relatively static memory system that consists of knowledge about the world, concepts, and symbols. Considerable work in the past few decades has challenged this static view of semantic memory, and instead proposed a more fluid and flexible system that is sensitive to context, task demands, and perceptual and sensorimotor information from the environment. This paper (1) reviews traditional and modern computational models of semantic memory, within the umbrella of network (free association-based), feature (property generation norms-based), and distributional semantic (natural language corpora-based) models, (2) discusses the contribution of these models to important debates in the literature regarding knowledge representation (localist vs. distributed representations) and learning (error-free/Hebbian learning vs. error-driven/predictive learning), and (3) evaluates how modern computational models (neural network, retrieval-based, and topic models) are revisiting the traditional "static" conceptualization of semantic memory and tackling important challenges in semantic modeling such as addressing temporal, contextual, and attentional influences, as well as incorporating grounding and compositionality into semantic representations. The review also identifies new challenges regarding the abundance and availability of data, the generalization of semantic models to other languages, and the role of social interaction and collaboration in language learning and development. The concluding section advocates the need for integrating representational accounts of semantic memory with process-based accounts of cognitive behavior, as well as the need for explicit comparisons of computational models to human baselines in semantic tasks to adequately assess their psychological plausibility as models of human semantic memory.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.