Fig. 4.

Model of interaction between initial semantic activation and verbal memory maintenance of activations. Strong associates are initially activated to a greater degree than weak associates. A faulty maintenance function in schizophrenia would cause the content of verbal memory to be determined by the decay rate of the initial excitation. Given a constant decay rate behavior would be solely a function of the semantic relatedness of associates until the point where no initial activation remained, beyond which behavior would be random. A bias toward strong associates would be greatest in the interval where weak associate activation approaches zero but strong associate activation remains above threshold.