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332 FISCHER
activation spreads out from it with decreasing strength to the several nodes directly or
indirectly linked to it, subject to the principles that familiarity attracts and use strengthens:
The more often a subject is exposed to a concept, the more strongly its node is activated each
time; and the more frequently a link is activated, the more activation it gradually comes to
pass on, while gradually atrophying upon disuse. An activated concept or proposition
becomes conscious when the node representing it is activated above a certain threshold and
more strongly than competitors. Association can therefore duplicate inferences, by spreading
activation in sufficient strength from connected nodes representing one proposition to nodes
that jointly represent another.
Associative processing within such a network is governed by the principle of partial matching
(Kamas et al. 1996). To encounter it, answer the question: ‘How many animals of each kind
did Moses take on the ark?’ In a classic experiment (Erickson and Mattson 1981), subjects
were asked to read this and other questions out aloud, and either answer them or indicate
that something is wrong with them, as appropriate. Over 80% answered “2” to the present
question – even though they knew that the protagonist of the ark story is Noah, not Moses. In
an attenuated form, the phenomenon persists when statements replace questions: In an
analogous task, 40% of knowledgeable subjects assented to the corresponding statement
about Moses. It seems subjects spontaneously interpret a question or statement about Moses
as stating a familiar fact or prior belief about Noah. So why is that? Such semantic illusions
are not explicable by reference to Gricean principles; but they may be due to partial matching
in associative processing which ensures that relevant answers can be retrieved to differently
phrased questions (Park and Reder 2004): Activation spreads from the node for the stimulus
concept (‘Moses’) via nodes for attributes and relations possessed by its bearer (Biblical
figure, leader, covenant with God, etc.) to nodes for bearers sharing these attributes
(including Noah). When one of these similar bearers’ node is activated also through other
channels (say, upon mention of the ark), propositions about this similar bearer may be
retrieved from memory.
A relevant process is outlined by the theory of interpretation-based processing INP (Budiu
and Anderson 2004). Its interpretation process exploits the possibilities of partial matching
and is incremental: It begins the moment the first semantic unit is read and parsed; results
are updated after each unit is read. At each point, propositions with semantically similar
concepts in matching positions are activated, where a concept is ‘semantically similar’ to
another, to the extent to which the things (individuals, stuffs, properties, etc.) they stand for
are believed to share the same attributes or relations. At each point, the most strongly
activated proposition is chosen as ‘candidate interpretation’ which specifies what the
processed statement states. As the subject reads each semantic unit (verb, adverb, noun
phrase), activation spreads to representations of several propositions with concepts
semantically similar to the one represented by that unit: about other Biblical figures, leaders,
etc. The most strongly activated candidate interpretation at a given point, say, ‘Moses took his
people out of Egypt’, retains such rapidly decaying activation – only – while the next semantic
unit is read, so that momentarily both the candidate and the new stimulus spread activation.
This may activate more strongly the representation of another proposition, which thus
replaces the previous candidate, and so on, until the entire sentence is read. In this way, a
semantically similar proposition the subject already believes true (Noah took two animals of
each kind onto the ark) may come to be accepted as content of the statement (‘Moses took…’).
This process is liable to interact in two ways with spontaneous applications of the metaphor
heuristic: INP will turn some clearly wrong conclusions of spontaneous analogical inferences
(conclusions ‘about Moses’, as it were) into apparent truisms (‘about Noah’). And it will help
forge fresh mappings which facilitate novel analogical inferences – and are not recommended
by the metaphor heuristic. This interaction is best explained through an example. Various
scholars have already connected the deliberate or unconscious use of visual metaphors with