TY - JOUR
T1 - Google and the mind
T2 - Predicting fluency with pagerank
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Steyvers, Mark
AU - Firl, Alana
PY - 2007/12
Y1 - 2007/12
N2 - Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.
AB - Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a component of the Google search engine. In this task, people were shown a letter of the alphabet and asked to name the first word beginning with that letter that came to mind. We show that PageRank, computed on a semantic network constructed from word-association data, outperformed word frequency and the number of words for which a word is named as an associate as a predictor of the words that people produced in this task. We identify two simple process models that could support this apparent correspondence between human memory and Internet search, and relate our results to previous rational models of memory.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=36348973643&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=36348973643&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02027.x
DO - 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02027.x
M3 - Article
C2 - 18031414
AN - SCOPUS:36348973643
SN - 0956-7976
VL - 18
SP - 1069
EP - 1076
JO - Psychological Science
JF - Psychological Science
IS - 12
ER -