Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts

ABSTRACT

Abstract concepts differ from concrete concepts in several ways. Here, we focus on what we refer to as situational systematicity: The objects and relations that constitute an abstract concept (e.g., justice) are more dispersed through space and time than are those that typically constitute a concrete concept (e.g., chair); a larger set of objects and relations constitute an abstract concept than a concrete one; and exactly which objects and relations constitute a concept is more context-dependent for abstract concepts. We thus refer to abstract concepts as having low situational systematicity. We contend that situational systematicity, rather than abstractness per se, is a critical determinant of the cognitive, behavioural, and neural phenomena associated with concepts. Further, viewing concepts as schema provides insight into (i) the situation-based dynamics of concept learning and representation and (ii) the functional significance of the brain regions and their interactions that comprise the schema control network.

KEYWORDS:

• Concepts
• semantic memory
• episodic memory
• abstract concepts
• schema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Charles P. Davis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7293-2769

Gerry T. M. Altmann http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8353-1381

Eiling Yee http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6614-9025

Notes

1 In fact, the greater activity in left IFG (and other left-lateralized frontal and temporal regions) often observed for abstract compared to concrete concepts in functional MRI studies has typically been interpreted in support of dual-coding theory and the role of language in representing abstract concepts (e.g., Binder et al., 2005; for meta-analyses, see Binder, Desai, Graves, & Conant, 2009; Wang et al., 2010), rather than as evidence of abstract concepts requiring greater top-down control (e.g., Hoffman et al., 2015).

2 Although down-regulated, these associations are central to enabling the system to generate individuated “tokens” of experience (distinguishing knowledge about the type of a thing, whether an object or an event, from knowledge about the token thing—the actual individuated object or event as grounded in a particular space and time; Altmann & Ekves, 2019).

3 We view as equivalent an approach in which a single concept such as sharing can refer to a range of situations and an approach in which sharing is a complex concept comprising several kinds of sharing (essentially corresponding to different, but overlapping, schemas); cf. polysemy.

4 Although most of the studies included in the meta-analysis conducted by Desai et al. (2018) did not directly compare concrete and abstract concepts, the finding that we refer to here (depicted in Figure 3 of Desai et al.) compares results of an ALE meta-analysis collapsing across tasks that target several domains of abstract concepts with an ALE meta-analysis that attempts to include only tasks and contrasts targeting concrete concepts.

5 This was operationalized as the average abstractness in tweets containing at least four words from Brysbaert et al.’s (2014) concreteness norms.