The Properties of Personal Semantics

Recent cognitive neuroscience research has uncovered some similarities and some differences between General semantic memory (GS; e.g., knowledge about family in general) and Personal semantic memory (PS; e.g., knowledge about my family in particular). To better understand the representational content and cognitive processes of PS and their relation to general semantics, we adapted a staple of General semantic memory research, the Property generation task. In a first study, we randomly assigned 240 adult participants to a traditional General semantics perspective (e.g., listing the properties of families and bedrooms in general) or to a PS perspective (e.g., my family, my bedroom) in a between-subjects design. In a second, replication study, 124 participants completed the task in a within-subject design, taking each perspective for different concepts. Relative to the General semantics condition, the PS condition was associated with more features; these were more semantically distant from each other, and included adjectives more frequently and nouns less frequently. However, the two conditions had substantial (~46%) overlap in the frequency of their features. The findings contribute to the identification of the cognitive differences (e.g., semantic richness) and similarities (e.g., correspondence in semantic features) between personal and general semantic memory.