The Evolution
48
squeak Army and hum White House, inasmuch as the nature of the chosen
concepts forces memory to use Type II intersection to arrive at media-
ting imagery. This is because Type I intersection, which works well
independent of order, has been rendered almost impossible by matching
visual concepts with auditory concepts.
Note that of the abundance of paired-associate learning tasks
described in places such as Paivio (1971), not one concerns itself
purely with Type II intersection as does the above experiment. Clearly
by careful regulation of part-whole and whole-to-whole linking, new
twists can be given to a large number of traditional cognitive tasks.
Polysemy
It was demonstrated by Anderson and Ortony (1975) that a phrase
may give rise to a mental representation that is more detailed than
the individual words of the phrase would seem to justify, and that
this may be viewed as essentially a problem of polysemy. For instance
the word container in the phrases cola container and apple container
might in the first instance be particularized in memory as "bottle,"
and in the second as "basket," even though these concepts are not
actually mentioned.
Similarly, there exists a more "subtle form of polysemy" (Anderson
& Ortony, 1975, p. 177) that apparently allows a word such as kick to
be represented in memory in as many different ways "as there are ani-
mals that kick and objects that can be kicked," where the particular
image yielded would depend on the contest in which kick was embedded.