  Free association is a task that requires a subject to express the first word
to come to their mind when presented with a certain cue. It is a task which can
be used to expose the basic mechanisms by which humans connect memories. In
this work we have made use of a publicly available database of free
associations to model the exploration of the averaged network of associations
using a statistical and the \emph{ACT-R} model. We performed, in addition, an
online experiment asking participants to navigate the averaged network using
their individual preferences for word associations. We have investigated the
statistics of word repetitions in this guided association task. We find that
the considered models mimic some of the statistical properties, viz the
probability of word repetitions, the distance between repetitions and the
distribution of association chain lengths, of the experiment, with the
\emph{ACT-R} model showing a particularly good fit to the experimental data for
the more intricate properties as, for instance, the ratio of repetitions per
length of association chains.

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems;Neurons and Cognition