Ways of probing situated concepts

Two ways of eliciting conceptual content have been to instruct participants to list the intrinsic properties that concept exemplars possess or to report any thoughts that come to mind about the concept. It has been argued that the open, unconstrained probe is better able to elicit the situational information that concepts contain. We evaluated this proposal in two experiments comparing the two probes with regard to the content that they yield for object concepts at the superordinate and basic levels. The results showed that the open probe was better able to elicit situated conceptual knowledge and point out differences in the representations of superordinate and basic concepts.

[1]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Situating Abstract Concepts , 2004 .

[2]  J. F. Marques,et al.  The general/specific breakdown of semantic memory and the nature of superordinate knowledge: insights from superordinate and basic-level feature norms. , 2007, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[3]  G. Murphy,et al.  Categorizing objects in isolation and in scenes: what a superordinate is good for. , 1989, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[4]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Perceptual simulation in conceptual combination: evidence from property generation. , 2009, Acta psychologica.

[5]  Rolf A. Zwaan,et al.  Grounding Cognition: Introduction to Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking , 2005 .

[6]  E. Rosch,et al.  Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[7]  M. Masson.  Using confidence intervals for graphically based data interpretation. , 2003, Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale.

[8]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Semantic feature production norms for a large set of living and nonliving things , 2005, Behavior research methods.

[9]  L. Barsalou,et al.  The situated nature of concepts. , 2006, The American journal of psychology.

[10]  Edward J. Wisniewski,et al.  Superordinate and basic category names in discourse: A textual analysis , 1989 .

[11]  Lawrence W Barsalou,et al.  Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. , 2003, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[12]  Wayne D. Gray,et al.  Basic objects in natural categories , 1976, Cognitive Psychology.

[13]  M. L. Lambon Ralph,et al.  Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: Analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts , 2001, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[14]  B. Tversky,et al.  Objects, parts, and categories. , 1984 .

[15]  Wolf Vanpaemel,et al.  Dutch norm data for 13 semantic categories and 338 exemplars , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[16]  Maureen A. Callanan,et al.  How Parents Label Objects for Young Children: The Role of Input in the Acquisition of Category Hierarchies. , 1985 .

[17]  George S. Cree,et al.  Factors underlying category-specific semantic deficits , 2001 .