ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Neural evidence of switch processes during semantic and phonetic foraging in human memory.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lexical Search and Retrieval in Aphasia: A Computational Analysis of Semantic Fluency.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Investigating category transitions and interresponse times in fluency tasks.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Unique signatures in verbal fluency task performance in schizophrenia and depression.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, activated glia, and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: a dual-tracer PET study.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- The evolution of phonemic verbal fluency test: bridging tradition with contemporary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Dynamic Synchronization and Resonance as the Origin of 1/f Fluctuations-Amplitude Modulation Across Music and Nature.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Large-Scale Social Feedback and Language Usage: a Distributional Analysis.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Causal contributions of left inferior and medial frontal cortex to semantic and executive control.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Leveraging relatedness-based measures in people with language disorders: A scoping review.Journal of neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Adaptive Decision-Making "Fast" and "Slow": A Model of Creative Thinking.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Review
- Self-guided transitions and creative idea search: adaptively choosing flexibility versus persistence in divergent and convergent thinking tasks.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- A non-Hebbian code for episodic memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Risky hybrid foraging: The impact of risk, reward value, and prevalence on foraging behavior in hybrid visual search.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Switching, fast and slow: Deciphering the dynamics of memory search, its brain connectivity patterns, and its role in creativity.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- The affective gradient hypothesis: an affect-centered account of motivated behavior.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Associations between neurolinguistic deficits and personality traits in people with epilepsy.Frontiers in neurology · 2024Article
- Evidence for optimal semantic search throughout adulthood.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural evidence of switch processes during semantic and phonetic foraging in human memory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Bigram semantic distance as an index of continuous semantic flow in natural language: Theory, tools, and applications.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
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8 authors.
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Abstract
Humans may retrieve words from memory by exploring and exploiting in "semantic space" similar to how nonhuman animals forage for resources in physical space. This has been studied using the verbal fluency test (VFT), in which participants generate words belonging to a semantic or phonetic category in a limited time. People produce bursts of related items during VFT, referred to as "clustering" and "switching." The strategic foraging model posits that cognitive search behavior is guided by a monitoring process which detects relevant declines in performance and then triggers the searcher to seek a new patch or cluster in memory after the current patch has been depleted. An alternative body of research proposes that this behavior can be explained by an undirected rather than strategic search process, such as random walks with or without random jumps to new parts of semantic space. This study contributes to this theoretical debate by testing for neural evidence of strategically timed switches during memory search. Thirty participants performed category and letter VFT during functional MRI. Responses were classified as cluster or switch events based on computational metrics of similarity and participant evaluations. Results showed greater hippocampal and posterior cerebellar activation during switching than clustering, even while controlling for interresponse times and linguistic distance. Furthermore, these regions exhibited ramping activity which increased during within-patch search leading up to switches. Findings support the strategic foraging model, clarifying how neural switch processes may guide memory search in a manner akin to foraging in patchy spatial environments.
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