Investigating Category Transitions and Interresponse Times in Fluency Tasks

Semantic fluency tasks involve recalling items from a given category (e.g., animals). It is well documented that these tasks produce heavy-tailed distributions of interresponse times (IRTs). Heavy-tailed distributions have been observed in a variety of contexts promoting efficient search. The current work investigates the role of categorical transitions within a single semantic category, multiple semantic categories, and non-semantic categories (e.g., letter categories). Counterintuitively, findings suggest the longer IRTs requisite for producing heavy-tails did not occur at the categorical transitions. Rather, the longest IRTs occurred immediately after switching categories. This work highlights similarities in foraging patterns across different domains from the physical and spatial to the cognitive and abstract.