Structural differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults

Cognitive science invokes semantic networks to explain diverse phenomena, from memory retrieval to creativity. Research in these areas often assumes a single underlying semantic network that is shared across individuals. Yet, recent evidence suggests that content, size, and connectivity of semantic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2022-12, Vol.12 (1), p.21459-21459, Article 21459
Main Authors: Wulff, Dirk U., Hills, Thomas T., Mata, Rui
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/1595
631/378/2612
631/477/2811
Age
Age differences
Aged
Cognitive ability
Creativity
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Life span
Longevity
Memory
multidisciplinary
Older people
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Semantic Web
Semantics
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Summary:Cognitive science invokes semantic networks to explain diverse phenomena, from memory retrieval to creativity. Research in these areas often assumes a single underlying semantic network that is shared across individuals. Yet, recent evidence suggests that content, size, and connectivity of semantic networks are experience-dependent, implying sizable individual and age-related differences. Here, we investigate individual and age differences in the semantic networks of younger and older adults by deriving semantic networks from both fluency and similarity rating tasks. Crucially, we use a megastudy approach to obtain thousands of similarity ratings per individual to allow us to capture the characteristics of individual semantic networks. We find that older adults possess lexical networks with smaller average degree and longer path lengths relative to those of younger adults, with older adults showing less interindividual agreement and thus more unique lexical representations relative to younger adults. Furthermore, this approach shows that individual and age differences are not evenly distributed but, rather, are related to weakly connected, peripheral parts of the networks. All in all, these results reveal the interindividual differences in both the content and the structure of semantic networks that may accumulate across the life span as a function of idiosyncratic experiences.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-022-11698-4