PSN: A prolog declarative model of conceptual knowledge

This paper introduces a declarative model of semantic memory, called PSN, written in Prolog. It is shown to be a descendant of Quillian’s (1969) Teachable Language Comprehender (TLC) in its structuring of knowledge as a conceptual reticulum and in its use of spreading activation as a retrieval mechanism. PSN goes beyond TLC, however, in its ability to instantiate the essential benchmark properties of human semantic retrieval. As such, it can provide cognitive science with a normative model on which to assess further research and it demonstrates the value of the Prolog language for modeling psychological processes.