Hierarchical spreading of activation

The present study investigated, within the framework of spreading activation model, whether or not nodes are activated in a hierarchical fashion in the memory network. If, for example, activation of plant spreads to flower and then to rose, subjects should take longer to detect the relation between plant and rose than that between either plant and flower or flower and rose. The results of an experiment conducted to test the above hypothesis showed a significant difference between subjects' RTs for the three kinds of word pairs. Appropriate post-hoc comparisons of the mean RTs supported the hypothesis of this study. That is, the time taken for subjects to detect the relation between pairs such as plant-rose was significantly greater than the time taken for them to detect the relation between the words in either plant-flower or flower-rose pair types.