The Role of Sequential Dependence in Creative Semantic Search

How do we search through our vast stores of knowledge to retrieve information demanded by the context and task at hand? Davelaar (this issue) finds that the words people report while searching for one word that is meaningfully associated with three cues (e.g., cues: comb, moon, dew; answer: honey; the Remote Associates Test, RAT) seem to be drawn from a superadditive combination of the semantic associations of the three cues, rather than “clustered” in pre-existing patches as expected by previous theories of semantic search (e.g., Troyer, Moscovitch, & Winocur, 1997). Although we found similar behavior in the same paradigm (Smith, Huber, & Vul, 2013), our interpretation hinged on a different property of search: There is sequential dependence between words reported during the search process. We believe that this sequential dependence is a fundamental feature of semantic search that gives rise to apparent clustering in previous work as well as providing further insights into Davelaar’s current results. When people list words that come to mind while solving RAT problems, responses that are closer in the sequence are more similar to one another than would be expected based solely on independent word selection, given the cue constraints (Smith et al., 2013). This holds both for words from the same semantic patch and those in different patches, indicating that semantic search is not simply sampling from sets of words or patches constrained by the cues, but that instead, the current state of the search process influences what will be retrieved next. This sequential dependence has recently provided new explanations of behavioral phenomena in semantic search with a single cue. For instance, it has been well established that in the process of free recall—producing as many words as possible that relate to a given category—peoples’ responses “cluster” (e.g., when listing animals, they might list several farm animals then some aquatic animals, etc.; Bousfield, 1953; Bousfield &