spreadr: An R package to simulate spreading activation in a network

The notion of spreading activation is a central theme in the cognitive sciences; however, the tools for implementing spreading activation computationally are not as readily available. This article introduces the spreadr R package, which can implement spreading activation within a specified network structure. The algorithmic method implemented in the spreadr subroutines follows the approach described in Vitevitch, Ercal, and Adagarla (Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 369, 2011), who viewed activation as a fixed cognitive resource that could “spread” among connected nodes in a network. Three sets of simulations were conducted using the package. The first set of simulations successfully reproduced the results reported in Vitevitch et al. (Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 369, 2011), who showed that a simple mechanism of spreading activation could account for the clustering coefficient effect in spoken word recognition. The second set of simulations showed that the same mechanism could be extended to account for higher false alarm rates for low clustering coefficient words in a false memory task. The final set of simulations demonstrated how spreading activation could be applied to a semantic network to account for semantic priming effects. It is hoped that this package will encourage cognitive and language scientists to explicitly consider how the structures of cognitive systems such as the mental lexicon and semantic memory interact with the process of spreading activation.