Assessing abstract thought and its relation to language with a new nonverbal paradigm: Evidence from aphasia

What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, "concept" has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).

Neurobiological mechanisms for language, symbols and concepts: Clues from brain-constrained deep neural networks

Neural networks are successfully used to imitate and model cognitive processes. However, to provide clues about the neurobiological mechanisms enabling human cognition, these models need to mimic the structure and function of real brains. Brain-constrained networks differ from classic neural networks by implementing brain similarities at different scales, ranging from the micro- and mesoscopic levels of neuronal function, local neuronal links and circuit interaction to large-scale anatomical structure and between-area connectivity. This review shows how brain-constrained neural networks can be applied to study in silico the formation of mechanisms for symbol and concept processing and to work towards neurobiological explanations of specifically human cognitive abilities. These include verbal working memory and learning of large vocabularies of symbols, semantic binding carried by specific areas of cortex, attention focusing and modulation driven by symbol type, and the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts partly influenced by symbols. Neuronal assembly activity in the networks is analyzed to deliver putative mechanistic correlates of higher cognitive processes and to develop candidate explanations founded in established neurobiological principles.

Grounded Cognition, Linguistic Relativity, and Abstract Concepts

Kemmerer's paper convincingly claims that the grounded cognition model (GCM) entails linguistic relativity. Here, we underline that tackling linguistic relativity and cultural differences is vital for GCM. First, it allows GCM to focus more on flexible rather than stable aspects of cognition. Second, it highlights the centrality of linguistic experience for human cognition. While GCM-inspired research underscored the similarity between linguistic and nonlinguistic concepts, it is now paramount to understand when and how language(s) influence knowledge. To this aim, we argue that linguistic variation might be particularly relevant for more abstract concepts-which are more debatable and open to revisions.

The language network is not engaged in object categorization

The relationship between language and thought is the subject of long-standing debate. One claim states that language facilitates categorization of objects based on a certain feature (e.g. color) through the use of category labels that reduce interference from other, irrelevant features. Therefore, language impairment is expected to affect categorization of items grouped by a single feature (low-dimensional categories, e.g. "Yellow Things") more than categorization of items that share many features (high-dimensional categories, e.g. "Animals"). To test this account, we conducted two behavioral studies with individuals with aphasia and an fMRI experiment with healthy adults. The aphasia studies showed that selective low-dimensional categorization impairment was present in some, but not all, individuals with severe anomia and was not characteristic of aphasia in general. fMRI results revealed little activity in language-responsive brain regions during both low- and high-dimensional categorization; instead, categorization recruited the domain-general multiple-demand network (involved in wide-ranging cognitive tasks). Combined, results demonstrate that the language system is not implicated in object categorization. Instead, selective low-dimensional categorization impairment might be caused by damage to brain regions responsible for cognitive control. Our work adds to the growing evidence of the dissociation between the language system and many cognitive tasks in adults.

A context-sensitive and non-linguistic approach to abstract concepts

Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person's abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response-as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept to be abstract, we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness-termed 'trial concreteness'-that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment

How are abstract concepts such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' represented in the mind? One prominent proposal suggests that abstract concepts are grounded in emotion. Supporting this 'affective embodiment' account, abstract concepts are rated to be more strongly positive or more strongly negative than concrete concepts. This paper demonstrates that this finding generalizes across languages by synthesizing rating data from Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish and Spanish. However, a deeper look at the same data suggests that the idea of emotional grounding only characterizes a small subset of abstract concepts. Moreover, when the concreteness/abstractness dimension is not operationalized using concreteness ratings, it is actually found that concrete concepts are rated as more emotional than abstract ones. Altogether, these results suggest limitations to the idea that emotion is an important factor in the grounding of abstract concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Embodiment and repeated exposure do not suffice for abstract concepts acquisition: evidence from tonal music cognition

Research on abstract concepts (AC) suggests that while some AC are enacted indirectly and occasionally, others are largely grounded in our sensory-motor and affective experience, and the opportunities to enact them are countless, which would allow us to acquire them without supervision. From this, the following question arises: do embodiment and repeated exposure suffice to dispense with supervision in abstract concepts acquisition (ACA)? In the present study, this question was addressed in the context of tonal music cognition, which demands a high level of abstraction, and via musical materials that participants had frequently heard and sung. Specifically, highly trained, moderately trained, and untrained participants (24 each) were given 12 well-known melodic fragments ending on tones instantiating 6 different scale degrees (2 times each) and asked to group (round 1) or pair (round 2) those fragments whose last tone conveyed the same (or a similar enough) level of stability or rest. If embodiment and repeated exposure suffice for ACA, then one would expect a scale degree-based grouping strategy regardless of participants' training level. Results showed that only highly trained participants systematically grouped stimuli ending on the same scale degree, particularly in round 2; moderately trained participants' performance was mixed, and tonality's influence on untrained participants was negligible. Further, moderately trained and untrained participants performed inconsistently, discarding in round 2 almost all of the pairs formed in round 1. These findings are integrated with previous findings on the effect of language, affect, and category type on conceptualization to account for why and when ACA requires supervision.

Abstract concepts: external influences, internal constraints, and methodological issues

There is a longstanding and widely held misconception about the relative remoteness of abstract concepts from concrete experiences. This review examines the current evidence for external influences and internal constraints on the processing, representation, and use of abstract concepts, like truth, friendship, and number. We highlight the theoretical benefit of distinguishing between grounded and embodied cognition and then ask which roles do perception, action, language, and social interaction play in acquiring, representing and using abstract concepts. By reviewing several studies, we show that they are, against the accepted definition, not detached from perception and action. Focussing on magnitude-related concepts, we also discuss evidence for cultural influences on abstract knowledge and explore how internal processes such as inner speech, metacognition, and inner bodily signals (interoception) influence the acquisition and retrieval of abstract knowledge. Finally, we discuss some methodological developments. Specifically, we focus on the importance of studies that investigate the time course of conceptual processing and we argue that, because of the paramount role of sociality for abstract concepts, new methods are necessary to study concepts in interactive situations. We conclude that bodily, linguistic, and social constraints provide important theoretical limitations for our theories of conceptual knowledge.

Concepts for Which We Need Others More: The Case of Abstract Concepts

The capability to form and use concepts is a core component of human cognition. Although all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor processes, more abstract concepts (e.g., “truth”) collect more heterogeneous and perceptually dissimilar exemplars; thus, linguistic interaction and social interaction are particularly crucial for their acquisition and use. Because of their indeterminacy, abstract concepts generate more uncertainty than more concrete concepts; hence, they induce people to monitor their inner knowledge longer and then to consult others to ask for information and negotiate the concept’s meaning. I propose that people need others more for abstract concepts than for concrete concepts: Other people are essential to acquire, process, and use abstract concepts. Conceiving abstract concepts in these terms requires the employment of novel, interactive methods to investigate how people represent them during their use.

Bodily, emotional, and public sphere at the time of COVID-19. An investigation on concrete and abstract concepts

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemics has dramatically affected people’s lives. Among newly established practices, it has likely enriched our conceptual representations with new components. We tested this by asking Italian participants during the first lockdown to rate a set of diverse words on several crucial dimensions. We found concepts are organized along a main axis opposing internal and external grounding, with fine-grained distinctions within the two categories underlining the role of emotions. We also show through a comparison with existing data that Covid-19 impacted the organization of conceptual representations. For instance, subclasses of abstract concepts that are usually distinct converge into a unitary group, characterized by emotions and internal grounding. Additionally, we found institutional and Covid-19 related concepts, for which participants felt more the need for others to understand the meaning, clustered together. Our results show that the spread of Covid-19 has simultaneously changed our lives and shaped our conceptual representations.