Associative asymmetry of compound words.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early verbal-memory researchers assumed participants represent memory of a pair of unrelated items with 2 independent, separately modifiable, directional associations. However, memory for pairs of unrelated words (A-B) exhibits associative symmetry: a near-perfect correlation between accuracy on forward (A →?) and backward (?← B) cued recall. This was viewed as arguing against the independent-associations hypothesis and in favor of the hypothesis that associations are remembered as holistic units. Here we test the Holistic Representation hypothesis further by examining cued recall of compound words. If we suppose preexisting words are more unitized than novel associations, the Holistic Representation hypothesis predicts compound words (e.g., ROSE BUD) will have a higher forward-backward correlation than novel compounds (e.g., BRIEF TAX). We report the opposite finding: Compound words, as well as noncompound words, exhibited less associative symmetry than novel compounds. This challenges the Holistic Representation account of associative symmetry. Moreover, preexperimental associates (positional family size) influenced associative symmetry-but asymmetrically: Increasing family size of the last constituent increasing decoupled forward and backward recall, but family size of the 1st constituent had no such effect. In short, highly practiced, meaningful associations exhibit associative asymmetry, suggesting associative symmetry is not diagnostic of holistic representations but, rather, is a characteristic of ad hoc associations. With additional learning, symmetric associations may be replaced by directional, independently modifiable associations as verbal associations become embedded within a rich knowledge structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".