Arguments about the nature of concepts: Symbols, embodiment, and beyond

Abstract

How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? This question, perhaps more than any other in the field, probes some of the deepest and most foundational puzzles regarding the structure of the mind and brain. Accordingly it has spawned a field of inquiry that is diverse and multi-disciplinary, has led to the discovery of numerous empirical phenomena and spurred the development of a wide range of theoretical positions. This volume brings together the most recent theoretical developments from the leaders in the field, representing a range of viewpoints on issues of fundamental significance to a theory of meaning representation. Here we introduce the special issue by way of pulling out some key themes that cut across the contributions that form this volume and situating those themes in the broader literature. The core issues around which research on conceptual representation can be organized are: representational format, representational content, the organization of concepts in the brain, and the processing dynamics that govern interactions between the conceptual system and sensorimotor representations. We highlight areas where consensus has formed; for those areas where opinion is divided, we seek to clarify the relation of theory and evidence and to set in relief the bridging assumptions that undergird current discussions.

Differential Tuning of Ventral and Dorsal Streams during the Generation of Common and Uncommon Tool Uses

“…etc.). Although many recent theories have posited that object representations are dynamically activated (see Mahon & Hickok, 2016, for a review) and some have explicitly focused on how different neural regions come online to support conceptual performance in a dynamic way (e.g., GRAPES model presented by Martin, 2016), there are no studies, to our knowledge, that have investigated how neural tuning of specific regions of the tool use network changes in different tasks or the relationship of that tuning to different behaviorally relevant information. In this study, we hypothesized that the representation of tool-related information is situated and would therefore be differentially tuned within the tool use network in common versus uncommon use tasks, with trade-offs observed between the ventral and dorsal streams.…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…Incorporated into cell assemblies for language, we suggest these cells contribute specific articulatory motor and/or action-related semantic information about meaningful words (and also action sounds). We must return briefly, here, to some of the controversies surrounding the function of these cells: specifically relating to the claim (originally by Mahon and Caramazza (2008) and later by Hickok (2014Hickok ( , 2010 and Mahon and Hickok (2016)) that motor (mirror) areas are activated by action words not because of their role in representing and processing action meaning, but instead because neural activation spreads there from some other regions where meaning is actually being processed. Although this represents a theoretical possibility that the low temporal resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) cannot refute, much of the available evidence presented in Section 1 strongly refutes this suggestion.…”

From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge

“…A central goal of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience is to understand how people represent and organize semantic knowledge (e.g., Mahon & Hickok, 2016;Yee, Jones, & McRae, in press). Semantic knowledge is a broad construct, including everything one knows about dogs, fruit, knives, things that are green, time machines, and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, etc.…”