Roughly speaking, abstract concepts such as TRUTH refer to entities that are neither purely physical nor spatially constrained (Wiemer-Hastings, Krug, & Xu, 2001). Such concepts pose a classic problem for theories that ground knowledge in modality-specific systems (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003a,b). Abstract concepts also pose a significant problem for traditional theories that represent knowledge with amodal symbols. Surprisingly, few researchers have attempted to specify the content of abstract concepts using feature lists, semantic networks, or frames. It is not enough to say that an amodal node or a pattern of amodal units represents an abstract concept. It is first necessary to specify the concept's content, before beginning the task of identifying how this content is represented.

Concept properties are an integral part of theories of conceptual representation and processing. To date, little is known about conceptual properties of abstract concepts, such as idea. This experiment systematically compared the content of 18 abstract and 18 concrete concepts, using a feature generation task. Thirty-one participants listed characteristics of the concepts (i.e., item properties) or their relevant context (i.e., context properties). Abstract concepts had significantly fewer intrinsic item properties and more properties expressing subjective experiences than concrete concepts. Situation components generated for abstract and concrete concepts differed in kind, but not in number. Abstract concepts were predominantly related to social aspects of situations. Properties were significantly less specific for abstract than for concrete concepts. Thus, abstractness emerged as a function of several, both qualitative and quantitative, factors.

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