Fuzziness in semantic memory: Choosing exemplars of subjective categories

Abstract

Class membership is a fundamental relationship between concepts in semantic memory. Recent research indicates that, class membership may subjectively be a continuous type of relationship. The processing of information about the degree to which items belong to a particular class was investigated in an experiment in which subjects compared two statements describing class membership relationships. The results strongly supported a simple model which describes the judgment process as directly involving subjective degree-of-truthfulness values. The success of the model indicates that the subjects were able to process this kind of fuzzy information in a consistent and systematic manner. Some of the implications of the human competancy for processing fuzzy information are discussed.