Negative Judgments In and About Semantic Memory 1

This research is concerned with determining how subjects falsify statements like A collie is a cat. A multiple regression analysis was performed which used 22 variables to try to predict the negative judgment times. The predictive variables are time to generate the superordinate of the instance (for example, dog), time to falsify that the superordinate is the predicate (for example, A dog is a cat), and time to encode the instance. This finding and others indicate that a prominent negation strategy is one in which the subject generates the superset of an instance and falsifies that the superset is the predicate. Auxiliary regression analyses are also reported for other reaction time measures gathered in the experiments. It is argued that large-scale regression experiments are critical to the inferential logic of a semantic memory experiment.