How We Build Semantic Memory
Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, columns about teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offer advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Bauer, P. J. (in press). Self-derivation through memory integration: A mechanism for building semantic memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
What do you think comes to mind when a psychology student thinks about memory? Perhaps they recall patient H. M., who famously lost the ability to form new episodic memories following surgical removal of his hippocampus. Or maybe a student thinks about fear conditioning, in which rodents demonstrate startle responses only in a specific context that was previously paired with electrical shocks. Often, psychology students recollect how people can develop false autobiographical memories that lead them to accuse the wrong person of a crime. Recalling these exciting facts about memory as she or he retrieves them is all part of the same process: the person’s semantic memory.
Semantic memory, which is long-term memory for facts and concepts, may lack the glitz and glamor of case studies, fear memories, and false autobiographical memories. However, semantic memory represents the storehouse of our world knowledge, making it worth every bit as much attention as other memory systems. APS Fellow Patricia Bauer investigates how children and adults accumulate world knowledge (Bauer, in press). Class instruction certainly helps people accrue specific facts, as do visits to museums, places of worship, and experiences at home. But, as Bauer explains, the sum of all these direct learning experiences does not equal the richness of world knowledge that people develop across their lifespans. A critical characteristic of semantic memory is that much of semantic knowledge is self-derived.
To understand self-derivation of memories, consider the following example from the Bauer laboratory. If someone is taught that a corolla is a bunch of flower petals (Fact 1), and then later taught that flower petals are used to make perfume (Fact 2), how would you expect the person to respond to the question, “What are corollas used to make?” If semantic memory was based solely on direct experiences, then the person would respond “I don’t know.” Empirical studies show differently. Children are able to integrate their learning and answer that corollas are used to make perfume. This new, factual knowledge was never shown to participants, and they were never instructed to try to integrate their learning. As such, this addition to semantic memory can be considered to be self-derived through memory integration.
Self-derivation of semantic knowledge is documented in 4-year-olds, and this ability rapidly improves over the next 2–4 years (Bauer & Larkina, 2017). In both children and adults, self-derivation occurs for facts that are presented across a range of modalities including individual sentences, story passages, graphics, and videos. In a particularly striking demonstration, bilingual 8–10-year-olds learned a fact in one language (“golden apple seeds taste like almonds”) and another fact in a second language (“los albaricoques también son llamados manzanas de oro” [“apricots are also called golden apples”]; Esposito & Bauer, 2019). These children showed cross-language self-derivation (“apricot seeds taste like almonds”), often to the levels seen when they learned both facts in the same language!
Self-derived semantic knowledge is lasting and consequential. The novel facts are retained when tested one week later (Varga & Bauer, 2017), and performance on the task relates to numerous desirable outcomes including better GPA, standardized test scores, and verbal comprehension (Varga et al., 2019). Some people show better self-derivation than others, likely because they have more extensive conceptual networks that can support stronger encodings and connections with new facts. In other words, more knowledge begets even more knowledge.
As it turns out, there is some glitz and glamor to semantic memory. Teaching psychology students about semantic memory will inform them how we learn about the world, piece by piece, integration by integration, silently forming the basis for our academic achievements and lifelong curiosities.
To actively teach self-derivation while simultaneously building retrieval practice opportunities into your class, have students generate their own examples for demonstrating self-derivation based on your course’s content. Show them the corolla trial as one example, as well as a second example that is relevant to your course. For example, after teaching about sleep, you could create the following example:
Fact 1: REM sleep involves muscle paralysis, except the eyes move rapidly under the eyelids.
Fact 2: Dreaming occurs during REM sleep.
Integration test: Which muscles move during dreaming?
After each student creates their own example based on your course, form groups of four to six students. Each student will take a turn reading their Fact 1. Then each student will take a turn reading their Fact 2. Finally, the students will ask their integration question and have the others in the group attempt to write the answer. If your course incorporates artificial intelligence tools, you can have students compare their success on the integration questions to ChatGPT’s performance on the same questions (without presenting ChatGPT with Fact 1 or Fact 2).
At the end of the exercise, engage the students in discussing what made the exercise easy or difficult, guiding them to consider the processes that Bauer hypothesizes to be most relevant: strength of initial fact encoding, likelihood of reactivation of Fact 1 when learning Fact 2, integration of both facts, and the ability to select the integrated fact upon questioning (among one’s larger network of known facts).
Conclude by encouraging students to expand on this activity at home by creating self-quiz questions that promote integrative thinking. Remind them that one limitation of common flashcard apps, such as Quizlet, is that they typically target memorization of facts without requiring integration or application. Professors want students to go beyond rote memorization—to expand their world knowledge—and practicing these skills will help them succeed academically and beyond.
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Additional References
Bauer, P. J., & Larkina, M. (2017). Realizing relevance: The influence of domain‐specific information on generation of new knowledge through integration in 4‐to 8‐year‐old children. Child Development, 88(1), 247–262. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12584
Esposito, A. G., & Bauer, P. J. (2019). Self-derivation through memory integration under low surface similarity conditions: The case of multiple languages. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 187, Article 104661. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.07.001
Varga, N. L., & Bauer, P. J. (2017). Young adults self-derive and retain new factual knowledge through memory integration. Memory & Cognition, 45(6), 1014–1027. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-017-0711-6
Varga, N. L., Esposito, A. G., & Bauer, P. J. (2019). Cognitive correlates of memory integration across development: Explaining variability in an educationally relevant phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(4), 739–762. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000581
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