Priming spreading activation

The stronger the connection between the ideas, the more quickly the person is able to recall relevant information. A person can probably verify very quickly the statement "A bird is an animal," because birds are very common, typical examples of the category "animal.

The model of spreading activation would account for this difficulty by saying that the node for "chinchilla" would not necessarily be activated by the category "animal. Of course, the associations between semantic concepts vary greatly from person to person. Someone who has a pet chinchilla, for example, will have far greater connections between "animal" and "chinchilla" than the general population.

In this way, the semantic categories described by spreading activation are a product both the actual content and of the individual experience. For this reason, the spreading activation model is very useful for describing how the mind has responded to a semantic task, but not necessarily useful for predicting how a person will respond to any given task.

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