Abstract Concepts in Grounded Cognition

Abstract

concepts in grounded cognitionAbstracte concepten in gegronde cognitie References 115 Summary in Dutch 133Curriculum Vitae 139 5 Introduction M orality, time, and valence are highly abstract concepts. Exactly how people are able to think and talk about abstract concepts is a question that has intrigued philosophers and scientists for centuries. In this thesis I focus on the question how people represent the meaning of abstract concepts, by investigating whether abstract concepts are understood through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow people to think about abstract concepts in terms of concrete experiences. For example, the scales of Lady Justice are a metaphor for justice. People might not be able to see the future, but it can be represented as being ahead of us. Black knights in fairytales are usually evil, and the color of their armor is a metaphoric representation of the relation they have with the knights in shining armor. These and similar metaphors are not only used to intentionally communicate the meaning of abstract concepts, but these metaphoric representations also underlie abstract conceptual thought. How the meaning of abstract concepts is grounded in concrete experiences is the topic of this dissertation.Broadly speaking, two views exist on how abstract concepts are represented in our mind. On the one hand, amodal views share the common theme that people think in a purely symbolic language, where concepts 6 are represented as artificial symbols, and computational operations are performed upon these symbols during conceptual processing (Dennett, 1969;Fodor, 1975;Pylyshyn, 1984;Jackendoff, 2002). These artificial symbols are inherently non-perceptual; none of the original sensory or motor information from any modality (e.g., vision, touch, sound, smell, etc) which created these symbols is present when the final amodal symbols are used to represent concepts. On the other hand, several views on the representation of concepts have emerged over the last decennium which all share the idea that conceptual processing is perceptual in nature (e.g., Barsalou, 1999;Gallese & Lakoff, 2005;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Jeannerod, 2001;Pulvermüller, 1999;Zwaan, 2004). According to these grounded approaches to cognition, conceptual thought consists of representations built on concrete sensorimotor information. For example, understanding the word 'kick' is assumed to depend at least in part on the activation of the muscles used to perform a kicking motion.As a result of the growing number of empirical studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor activation in language comprehension, a consensus is emerging that sensorimotor areas in the brain are activated when people read words related to concrete concepts (Zwaan, 2009;Mahon & Caramazza, 2009;Vigliocco & Meteyard, 2008). For example, thinking about the color of a banana activates brain areas in the visual cortex (Simmons, Ramjee, Beauchamp, McRae, Martin, & Barsalou, 2007). Thinking about the color of a banana leads to remarkably similar pattern...

How to Represent Abstract Concepts? From the Perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

“…concepts, such as power considered to be automatically connected to vertical position [37]; the association between affect and vertical position considered to be automatic [38]; affective evaluations considered to bias subsequent tone categorization automatically [39]; closeness considered to be mapped onto similarity automatically [40]. explained the metaphor congruency effects as the results of Stroop-like inference effect [34,38]. In the Stroop effect, there are two dimensions of stimuli, one (naming the ink color) requires much more attention and is processed slower than the other (reading the irrelevant word), thus the relatively slower color naming require much more attention resources which is considered to be controlled) than the relatively fast word reading that is considered to be automatic.…”