“Robins are a part of birds”: The confusion of semantic relations

Abstract

Multidimensional scaling, applied to similarity ratings of parts, was used to demonstrate that parts are not organized in memory in terms of similarity. Parts differ, in this way, from category members. Similarity is one element of the class inclusion relation, but not of the part-whole relation. Failure to attend to the properties of relations is one source of relation confusion. Relation confusion appears to be pervasive in relation comprehension and this raises doubts about the use of semantic relations as theoretical primitives in theories of semantic memory.