Concept Map and Analysis

Your homework this week is to do some experimentation with concept maps. This will be an extension of what we do in class. Specifically, you need to: …5) Submit your task, the resulting concept map, and your analysis of what you can deduce about the subject's knowledge on the task.

Task: The first prompt given to my participant was the question, “What constitutes good health?”

A graphical representation, or concept map, began with the two-word concept, “good health”, as the beginning node, or point. (Click on the concept map below to see an enlarged view.) From this beginning vertex, primary links, or lines, were connected to three major components of good health, as defined by my participant. These three interrelated concepts were listed by my participant as “body”, “mind”, and “spirit”. He felt all aspects of good health could be grouped into one of these three categories. He also felt these three concepts were interrelated. For example, if someone was physically ill, his/her mind and spirit would also be affected. From “body”, “mind”, and “spirit”, my participant was able to brainstorm more interrelated ideas. Through this process, he chose to first generalize a concept, and then be more specific. For example, under the more general topic of “food”, he listed what he considered to be specific foods that would fall into the broader topic of “good health”. He linked these foods under the concepts of both “body” and “mind”. His rationale for associating them with “mind” was that it required “a choice” to eat certain foods, and that was connected to thought.

Ashcraft refers to Collins and Quillian (1972), suggesting that a concept activates a path via some property from one to the other. My participant demonstrated evidence of this while creating the concept map by everything being defined in terms of everything else. His concept of “good health” was a set of interrelationships among other concepts.

According to Ashcraft, the structure of semantic memory could be considered to be a network. The major process that operates on this network, or structure, is spreading activation. Spreading activation is the mental activity of accessing and retrieving information from this network. Once a particular concept comes to mind, its mental representation receives a boost in activation, and the concept becomes “active” or “primed” or “awakened”. An important feature of spreading activation is that once a concept becomes activated, the concept then starts spreading throughout the network along with the connecting pathways. My participant demonstrated that this spread of activation did, indeed, correspond to a memory search, in which the search continually widened, listing more specific concepts under the broader topics.

Ashcraft also discusses proposition, which he defines as a relationship between two concepts. My participant demonstrated an understanding of relationships between concepts, as pictorially demonstrated in the concept map with the connecting arrows. There were concepts he chose to connect both ways, and other concepts which he chose to connect in just one way. He verbalized that some topics were more easily connected one way or the other. (e.g. one arrow pointing from one concept to the other, or two arrows, going both ways…he said it could be a matter of personal interpretation.)

Another point made by Ashcraft is that the higher the semantic relatedness between concepts, the faster you are able to retrieve the connection between them. This is referred to as the semantic relatedness effect; “concepts that are more highly interrelated can be judged ‘true’ more rapidly than those with a lower degree of relatedness.” In other words, semantic memory stores concepts in terms of their relatedness to one another, and this is the basic dimension along which semantic memory is organized. The fact that the participant opted to categorize “good health” into the three subcategories before going any further implies the aforementioned semantic relatedness effect. In addition, he spoke the terms quickly, without hesitation, demonstrating that when the prime is relevant, retrieval time to the target is usually speeded up. This is generally taken as evidence that semantic priming is an automatic process. The three main “primes” then, following “good health” were “body”, “mind” and “spirit”. The targets that followed then served as primes, etc.

What I can deduce about the subject's knowledge on the task is that he appears to have a general, broad-minded view of what constitutes good health. I should add, here, that the participant was my 21 year old son, who was willing to help me with this project as long as I promised him that the task would not be too taxing, in terms of his time and/or his mental exertion.