Flexible foundations of abstract thought: A review and a theory

Abstract

Flexible foundations of abstract thought: A review and a theory. In: Maas, A. & Schubert, T. (Eds). "Spatial dimensions of social thought". Mouton de Gruyter. There may be some minor differences between the prepub and published versions.

Dimensional overlap between time and space

“…There is broad evidence that our cognitive representation of time is connected to our representation of space (e.g., Boroditsky 2000; Santiago et al 2011;Walsh 2003). In the present study, we aimed to assess the strength of this timespace linkage.…”

“…Therefore, the question of how time enters into our thinking and shapes our cognition has challenged philosophers and cognitive scientists (Evans 2005;Le Poidevin 2004;Roeckelein 2000). It appears that we mentally draw on the more accessible domain of space when we are thinking about the abstract concept of time (e.g., Boroditsky 2000; Boroditsky and Ramscar 2002;Casasanto et al 2010;Núñez and Sweetser 2006;Torralbo et al 2006; for a review, see Santiago et al 2011). For example, this space-time linkage is reflected by the fact that languages around the world use spatial expressions to talk about time (e.g., back in the old days or to be ahead of one's time ;Clark 1973;Haspelmath 1997).…”

Priming the mental time-line: effects of modality and processing mode

“…A modulation of the abstract-concrete relationship by task demands, however, is explicitly predicted by an alternative account recently proposed by Santiago et al (2011). Their ''coherent working models (CWM) theory'' stresses the contribution of working memory and attentional influences over a hard-wired semantic memory structure.…”

“…Since such an interaction had been repeatedly demonstrated for visual stimuli (e.g., Santiago et al 2007;Torralbo et al 2006), Ouellet et al (2010b) provides some indication of the involvement of modalityspecific processes in the activation of the mental time-line. Recently, Santiago et al (2011) proposed a working memory based theory which captures the influence of task demands and modality-specific processes on the activation of spatial codes by temporal codes. This theory is introduced in more detail in the discussion section.…”

Attentional Factors in Conceptual Congruency

“…However, it could just as well support the alternative views that (a) the representation of concrete domains completely depends on the conceptualization of abstract domains; or (b) that both concrete and abstract domains share an underlying representation or mechanism responsible for the cross-domain interactions. In other words, asymmetric cross-domain priming fulfils the crucial role of providing an empirical index of the progressive building of upper (abstract) levels of the human conceptual structure on the lower (concrete) levels, which grounds the whole structure on perceptuo-motor foundations (a view that Santiago, Román, & Ouellet, 2011, termed the Solid Foundations View of concepts). Without asymmetric priming, only the asymmetric linguistic patterns remain as evidence for this view.…”