In search of different categories of abstract concepts: a fMRI adaptation study
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Conca F
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8604982 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The relation of abstract concepts to the modality-specific systems is discussed controversially. According to classical approaches, the semantic content of abstract concepts can only be coded by amodal or verbal-symbolic representations distinct from the sensory and motor systems, because abstract concepts lack a clear physical referent. Grounded cognition theories, in contrast, propose that abstract concepts do not depend only on the verbal system, but also on a variety of modal systems involving perception, action, emotion and internal states. In order to contribute to this debate, we investigated the semantic content of abstract concepts using a property generation task. Participants were asked to generate properties for 296 abstract concepts, which are relevant for constituting their meaning. These properties were categorized by a coding-scheme making a classification into modality-specific and verbal contents possible. Words were additionally rated with regard to concreteness/abstractness and familiarity. To identify possible subgroups of abstract concepts with distinct profiles of generated features, hierarchical cluster analyses were conducted. Participants generated a substantial proportion of introspective, affective, social, sensory and motor-related properties, in addition to verbal associations. Cluster analyses revealed different subcategories of abstract concepts, which can be characterized by the dominance of certain conceptual features. The present results are therefore compatible with grounded cognition theories, which emphasize the importance of linguistic, social, introspective and affective experiential information for the representation of abstract concepts. Our findings also indicate that abstract concepts are highly heterogeneous requiring the investigation of well-specified subcategories of abstract concepts, for instance as revealed by the present cluster analyses. The present study could thus guide future behavioral or imaging work further elucidating the representation of abstract concepts.
| S-EPMC6156367 | biostudies-literature
Project description:concepts (ACs, e.g. 'justice') are more complex compared with concrete concepts (CCs) (e.g. 'table'). Indeed, they do not possess a single object as a referent, they assemble quite heterogeneous members and they are more detached from exteroceptive and more grounded in interoceptive experience. Recent views have hypothesized that interpersonal communication is particularly crucial to acquire and use ACs. The current study investigates the reliance of ACs/CCs representation on interpersonal behaviour. We asked participants to perform a motor interaction task with two avatars who embodied two real confederates. Before and after the motor interaction task, the two confederates provided participants with hints in a concept guessing task associated with visual stimuli: one helped in guessing ACs and the other, CCs. A control study we performed both with the materials employed in the main experiment and with other materials, confirmed that associating verbal concepts with visual images was more difficult with ACs than with CCs. Consistently, the results of the main experiment showed that participants asked for more hints with ACs than CCs and were more synchronous when interacting with the avatar corresponding to the AC's confederate. The results highlight an important role of sociality in grounding ACs.
| S-EPMC8316795 | biostudies-literature
Project description:conceptual representations are critical for human cognition. Despite their importance, key properties of these representations remain poorly understood. Here, we used computational models of distributional semantics to predict multivariate fMRI activity patterns during the activation and contextualization of abstract concepts. We devised a task in which participants had to embed abstract nouns into a story that they developed around a given background context. We found that representations in inferior parietal cortex were predicted by concept similarities emerging in models of distributional semantics. By constructing different model families, we reveal the models' learning trajectories and delineate how abstract and concrete training materials contribute to the formation of brain-like representations. These results inform theories about the format and emergence of abstract conceptual representations in the human brain.
| S-EPMC8849470 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The concept of sound iconicity implies that phonemes are intrinsically associated with non-acoustic phenomena, such as emotional expression, object size or shape, or other perceptual features. In this respect, sound iconicity is related to other forms of cross-modal associations in which stimuli from different sensory modalities are associated with each other due to the implicitly perceived correspondence of their primal features. One prominent example is the association between vowels, categorized according to their place of articulation, and size, with back vowels being associated with bigness and front vowels with smallness. However, to date the relative influence of perceptual and conceptual cognitive processing on this association is not clear. To bridge this gap, three experiments were conducted in which associations between nonsense words and pictures of animals or emotional body postures were tested. In these experiments participants had to infer the relation between visual stimuli and the notion of size from the content of the pictures, while directly perceivable features did not support-or even contradicted-the predicted association. Results show that implicit associations between articulatory-acoustic characteristics of phonemes and pictures are mainly influenced by semantic features, i.e., the content of a picture, whereas the influence of perceivable features, i.e., size or shape, is overridden. This suggests that abstract semantic concepts can function as an interface between different sensory modalities, facilitating cross-modal associations.
| S-EPMC5665516 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recent work has shown that listeners process words faster if said by a member of the group that typically uses the word. This paper further explores how the social distributions of words affect lexical access by exploring whether access is facilitated by invoking more abstract social categories. We conduct four experiments, all of which combine an Implicit Association Task with a Lexical Decision Task. Participants sorted real and nonsense words while at the same time sorting older and younger faces (exp. 1), male and female faces (exp. 2), stereotypically male and female objects (exp. 3), and framed and unframed objects, which were always stereotypically male or female (exp. 4). Across the experiments, lexical decision to socially skewed words is facilitated when the socially congruent category is sorted with the same hand. This suggests that the lexicon contains social detail from which individuals make social abstractions that can influence lexical access.
| S-EPMC6361498 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A large portion of human knowledge comprises "abstract" concepts that lack readily perceivable properties (e.g., "love" and "justice"). Since abstract concepts lack such properties, they have historically been treated as an undifferentiated category of knowledge in the psychology and neuropsychology literatures. More recently, the categorical structure of abstract concepts is often explored using paradigms that ask participants to make explicit judgments about a set of concepts along dimensions that are predetermined by the experimenter. Such methods require the experimenter to select dimensions that are relevant to the concepts and further that people make explicit judgments that accurately reflect their mental representations. We bypassed these requirements by collecting two large sets of non-verbal and implicit judgments about which dimensions are relevant to the similarity between pairs of 50 abstract nouns to determine the representational space of the concepts. We then identified categories within the representational space using a clustering procedure that required categories to replicate across two independent data sets. In a separate experiment, we used automatic semantic priming to further validate the categories and to show that they are an improvement over categories that were defined within the same set of abstract concepts using explicit ratings along predetermined dimensions. These results demonstrate that abstract concepts can be characterized beyond their negative relation to concrete concepts and that categories of abstract concepts can be defined without using a priori dimensions for the concepts or explicit judgments from participants.
| S-EPMC10794597 | biostudies-literature
Project description:words refer to concepts that cannot be directly experienced through our senses (e.g. truth, morality). How we ground the meanings of abstract words is one of the deepest problems in cognitive science today. We investigated this question in an experiment in which 62 participants were asked to communicate the meanings of words (20 abstract nouns, e.g. impulse; 10 concrete nouns, e.g. insect) to a partner without using the words themselves (the taboo task). We analysed the speech and associated gestures that participants used to communicate the meaning of each word in the taboo task. Analysis of verbal and gestural data yielded a number of insights. When communicating about the meanings of abstract words, participants' speech referenced more people and introspections. In contrast, the meanings of concrete words were communicated by referencing more objects and entities. Gesture results showed that when participants spoke about abstract word meanings their speech was accompanied by more metaphorical and beat gestures, and speech about concrete word meanings was accompanied by more iconic gestures. Taken together, the results suggest that abstract meanings are best captured by a model that allows dynamic access to multiple representation systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.
| S-EPMC6015825 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recent theories propose that abstract concepts, compared to concrete ones, might activate to a larger extent interoceptive, social and linguistic experiences. At the same time, recent research has underlined the importance of investigating how different sub-kinds of abstract concepts are represented. We report a pre-registered experiment, preceded by a pilot study, in which we asked participants to evaluate the difficulty of 3 kinds of concrete concepts (natural objects, tools, and food concepts) and abstract concepts (Philosophical and Spiritual concepts, PS, Physical Space Time and Quantity concepts, PSTQ, and Emotional, Mental State and Social concepts, EMSS). While rating the words, participants were assigned to different conditions designed to interfere with conceptual processing: they were required to squeeze a ball (hand motor system activation), to chew gum (mouth motor system activation), to self-estimate their heartbeats (interoception), and to perform a motor articulatory task (inner speech involvement). In a control condition they simply rated the difficulty of words. A possible interference should result in the increase of the difficulty ratings. Bayesian analyses reveal that, compared to concrete ones, abstract concepts are more grounded in interoceptive experience and concrete concepts less in linguistic experience (mouth motor system involvement), and that the experience on which different kinds of abstract and concrete concepts differs widely. For example, within abstract concepts interoception plays a major role for EMSS and PS concepts, while the ball squeezing condition interferes more for PSTQ concepts, confirming that PSTQ are the most concrete among abstract concepts, and tap into sensorimotor manual experience. Implications of the results for current theories of conceptual representation are discussed.
| S-EPMC7492812 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We rarely use abstract and concrete concepts in isolation but rather embedded within a linguistic context. To examine the modulatory impact of the linguistic context on conceptual processing, we isolated the case of sentential negation polarity, in which an interaction occurs between the syntactic operator not and conceptual information in the negation's scope. Previous studies suggested that sentential negation of concrete action-related concepts modulates activation in the fronto-parieto-temporal action representation network. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we examined the influence of negation on a wider spectrum of meanings, by factorially manipulating sentence polarity (affirmative, negative) and fine-grained abstract (mental state, emotion, mathematics) and concrete (related to mouth, hand, leg actions) conceptual categories. We adopted a multivariate pattern analysis approach, and tested the accuracy of a machine learning classifier in discriminating brain activation patterns associated to the factorial manipulation. Searchlight analysis was used to localize the discriminating patterns. Overall, the neural processing of affirmative and negative sentences with either an abstract or concrete content could be accurately predicted by means of multivariate classification. We suggest that sentential negation polarity modulates brain activation in distributed representational semantic networks, through the functional mediation of syntactic and cognitive control systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.
| S-EPMC6015826 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children's emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has not been investigated. According to recent theories, while all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, abstract concepts activate linguistic and social information more than concrete ones. Specifically, the Words As Social Tools (WAT) proposal predicts that the simulation of their meaning leads to an activation of the mouth (Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Borghi and Zarcone, 2016). Since the pacifier affects facial mimicry forcing mouth muscles into a static position, we hypothesize its possible interference on acquisition/consolidation of abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional concepts, which are mainly conveyed during social and linguistic interactions, than of concrete concepts. Fifty-nine first grade children, with a history of different frequency of pacifier use, provided oral definitions of the meaning of abstract not-emotional, abstract emotional, and concrete words. Main effect of concept type emerged, with higher accuracy in defining concrete and abstract emotional concepts with respect to abstract not-emotional concepts, independently from pacifier use. Accuracy in definitions was not influenced by the use of pacifier, but correspondence and hierarchical clustering analyses suggest that the use of pacifier differently modulates the conceptual relations elicited by abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional. While the majority of the children produced a similar pattern of conceptual relations, analyses on the few (6) children who overused the pacifier (for more than 3 years) showed that they tend to distinguish less clearly between concrete and abstract emotional concepts and between concrete and abstract not-emotional concepts than children who did not use it (5) or used it for short (17). As to the conceptual relations they produced, children who overused the pacifier tended to refer less to their experience and to social and emotional situations, use more exemplifications and functional relations, and less free associations.
| S-EPMC5717369 | biostudies-literature