Situating Abstract Concepts

By Lawrence W. Barsalou, K. Wiemer-hastings. 2004

573 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Situating Abstract Concepts Lawrence W. Barsalou (barsalou@emory.edu) Department of Psychology Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA Katja Wiemer-Hastings (katja@niu.edu) Department of Psychology Northern Illinois University, DeKalb IL 60115 USA 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. concepts. For all concepts, participants tended to describe background situations, including information about entities, settings, events, and mental states. Indeed the similarities between concepts were more striking than the differernces. Both analyses also offered support for Hypothesis 2, namely, concrete and abstract concepts differed in their situational foci. Whereas concrete concepts focused more on objects, locations, and behaviors, abstract concepts focused more on social aspects of situations (e.g., people, communication, social institutions) and mental states (e.g., beliefs. complex relations). Intermediate concepts lay in between. Consistent with Hypothesis 3, conceptual structures were most complex for abstract concepts. Abstract concepts were most likely to contain deep hierarchies of large conceptual clusters organized by complex relations. Regarding Hypothesis 4, we see no reason that the content of abstract concepts cannot be represented in simulations. Because their content is perceived in the situations that involve abstract concepts, it could, in principle, be reenacted later when representing them. Clearly, much further research beyond this exploratory study is necessary. Hypotheses A common assumption is that abstract and concrete concepts have little conceptual content in common, if any. Alternatively, we propose that concrete and abstract concepts share important similarities. In particular, we propose that they share common situational content, namely, information about agents, objects, settings, events, and mental states (Hypothesis 1). Where concrete and abstract concepts differ is in their specific foci within background situations. Whereas concrete concepts focus on objects and settings, abstract concepts focus on events and mental states (Hypothesis 2). As a result of these different foci, the representations of abstract concepts are more complex, being less localized in situational content (Hypothesis 3). Finally, because the content of abstract concepts is grounded in situations, modality-specific simulations could, in principle, represent it (Hypothesis 4). Acknowledgement This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grants SBR-9905024 and BCS-0212134 to Lawrence W. Barsalou. References Barsalou, L.W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577-609. Barsalou, L.W. (2003a). Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, 358, 1177-1187. Barsalou, L.W. (2003b). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, Barsalou, L.W., & Wiemer-Hastings, K. (in press). Situating abstract concepts. In D. Pecher and R. Zwaan (Eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiemer-Hastings, K., Krug, J., & Xu, X. (2001). Imagery, context availability, contextual constraint, and abstractness. Proceedings of the 23 rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1134-1139. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Method In an exploratory study, we assessed the content of three abstract concepts: TRUTH, FREEDOM, and INVENTION. These concepts were compared to three concrete concepts— BIRD, CAR, and SOFA—and also to three intermediate concepts—COOKING, FARMING, and CARPETING. We first asked participants to produce properties typically true of these concepts. We then analyzed these properties using two coding schemes, one that coded small protocol units, and a second that coded large ones. Results For the complete results, see Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (in press). Both coding analyses offered support for Hypothesis 1, namely, common situational content was produced across concrete, intermediate, and abstract

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Words as tools and the problem of abstract words meanings (2009, background): “According to a third view, proposed by Barsalou et al. (Barsalou, 2003; Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), abstract concepts differ from concrete ones as they derive from simulations of internal states rather than of external ones.”
Integrating experiential and distributional data to learn semantic representations. (2009, background): “Although there have been suggestions about how to ground abstract words in sensory-motor data (e.g., Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Glenberg, Sato, & Cattaneo, 2008), it nonetheless remains a formidable challenge to describe how these words are learned from experiential data.”
Facilitating Understanding of Movements in Dynamic Visualizations: an Embodied Perspective (2011, background): “Abstract concepts are understood by mapping sets of correspondences of concrete concepts to those of abstract concepts, and abstract concepts are therefore supposed to be situated in physical experiences associated with concrete concepts (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings 2005).”
Conceptual representations in mind and brain: theoretical developments, current evidence and future directions. (2012, background): “We assume that abstract and concrete concepts are similarly grounded in perception and action (Kiefer and Barsalou, 2011; Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Pulvermüller, 2008b).”
Grounded Cognition: Past, Present, and Future (2010, background): “Another compatible possibility is that abstract concepts are grounded in simulations of introspective experience and situations (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).”
Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion (2006, background): “Context is particularly important to constructing a situated conceptualization of abstract concepts (Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005) such as anger.”
Abstract concepts: sensory-motor grounding, metaphors, and beyond (2011, methodology): “…to a destination (the solution) along a path (the method that is used to solve the problem), as is illustrated by expressions such as to get sidetracked or to have something get in one’s way (Gibbs, 1994, 2005; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; but see Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).”
Varieties of abstract concepts and their multiple dimensions (2019, background): “…views that propose an important role of emotions (Kousta et al., 2011; Vigliocco et al., 2013) and of other inner processes for ACs (introspection: Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; general metacognition: Borghi et al., 2018a; see Zdrazilova & Pexman, 2013, for similar results): emotionality and…”
Categorization theory and research in consumer psychology: category representation and category-based inference (2008, background): “Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (2005) further extend this approach to the representation of abstract concepts.”
What’s in a Word? Language Constructs Emotion Perception (2013, background): “Cognitive science demonstrates that in the absence of clear statistical regularities, humans use a word as the “glue” that holds perceptual instances together as members of a category (see Barsalou & WiemerHastings, 2005).”
The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters. (2011, background): “In addition to the work by Altarriba and colleagues (Altarriba et al., 1999; Altarriba and Bauer, 2004), already discussed, Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (2005) also suggest that abstract concepts and word meanings are grounded in introspective states (mental and affective).”
Combining Language and Vision with a Multimodal Skip-gram Model (2015, background): “The multimodal vectors we induce also display an interesting intrinsic property related to the hypothesis that grounded representations of abstract words are more complex than for concrete ones, since abstract concepts relate to varied and composite situations (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).”
Embodiment theory and education: The foundations of cognition in perception and action (2012, background): “In the following, it is shown that embodied theory is also able to account for the representation of other abstract concepts suggesting that the classically proposed dichotomy between so-called concrete and abstract concepts [37] does not exist: According to embodied cognition theory, abstract conce”
Virtual Embodiment: A Scalable Long-Term Strategy for Artificial Intelligence Research (2016, background): “In contrast, there is abundant evidence that human meaning representation is grounded in physical reality and sensorimotor experience [9, 10, 11, 12, 13].”
What makes a metaphor an embodied metaphor? (2015, background): “…what this influential paper actually proposed is that “a direct, non-metaphorical representation of an abstract domain is essential,” and that “perceptual symbol systems can represent all abstract concepts directly” (Barsalou 1999: 600; see also Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings 2005; Prinz 2002).”