Lion – tiger – stripes: Delimiting the semantic association effect on working memory with mediated association

Ishiguro, Sho, Guitard, Dominic and Saint-Aubin, Jean 2025. Lion – tiger – stripes: Delimiting the semantic association effect on working memory with mediated association. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Semantic relatedness of items improves working memory performance. We targeted one type of semantic relatedness, semantic association. The beneficial effect of association is often explained by the spreading-activation process: Encoding/maintaining an item would activate its associated item. Nevertheless, as associated words can be similar to each other (e.g., similarity based on the Latent Semantic Analysis), other processes rather than spreading activation may also explain the association effect. To target spreading activation selectively, a novel hypothesis unique to this process was tested. Specifically, we tested the effect of mediated or two-step association, which the spreading-activation theory assumes (e.g., lion -> tiger -> stripes). To examine the mediated association effect, Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B presented word pairs with indirect association (e.g., “lion” and “stripes”) without mediators (e.g., “tiger”). Only one of the three experiments provided moderate evidence for a beneficial effect of mediated association. Additionally, cross-experiment and item level analyses did not support the mediated association effect. By contrast, Experiments 3 and 4 presented word pairs with direct association (e.g., “tiger” and “stripes”) and demonstrated extreme evidence for a beneficial effect of direct association. The negligible effect of mediated association would aid delimiting the scope of association’s influence on working memory.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Psychology
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	1747-0218
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 October 2025
Date of Acceptance:	14 October 2025
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2025 09:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181713

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