School of Psychological Sciences, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Cognition. 2012 Dec;125(3):452-65. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.010. Epub 2012 Aug 27.
Abstract concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and less accurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. In two studies, we examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability ratings to a set of perceptual strength norms in five separate modalities: sound, taste, touch, smell and vision. Results showed that concreteness and imageability do not reflect the perceptual basis of concepts: concreteness ratings appear to be based on two different intersecting decision criteria, while imageability ratings are visually biased. Analysis of lexical decision and word naming performance showed that maximum perceptual strength (i.e., strength in the dominant perceptual modality) consistently outperformed both concreteness and imageability ratings in accounting for variance in response latency and accuracy. We conclude that so-called concreteness effects in word processing emerge from the perceptual strength of a concept's representation and discuss the implications for theories of conceptual representation.
抽象概念通常被认为与具体概念不同，因为它们缺乏感知信息，这使得它们的处理速度比基于感知的具体概念慢，准确性也更低。在两项研究中，我们通过将具体性和形象性评分与一系列不同感觉模式（声音、味觉、触觉、嗅觉和视觉）的感知强度规范进行比较，检验了这一假设。结果表明，具体性和形象性并不能反映概念的感知基础：具体性评分似乎基于两个不同的交叉决策标准，而形象性评分则偏向于视觉。对词汇判断和单词命名表现的分析表明，在解释反应时和准确性的方差时，最大感知强度（即主导感知模式的强度）始终优于具体性和形象性评分。我们的结论是，在单词处理中所谓的具体性效应源自概念表示的感知强度，并讨论了这些结论对概念表示理论的意义。
