Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford.
Department of Dutch Studies, University of Amsterdam.
Top Cogn Sci. 2018 Jul;10(3):490-500. doi: 10.1111/tops.12354. Epub 2018 Jun 22.
Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. For example, because abstract concepts do not designate referents that can be experienced through our body, the role of perceptual experiences in shaping their content remains controversial. Current theories suggest a variety of alternative explanations to the question of "how abstract concepts are represented in the human mind." These views pinpoint specific streams of semantic information that would play a prominent role in shaping the content of abstract concepts, such as situation-based information (e.g., Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, ), affective information (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, ), and linguistic information (Louwerse, ). Rarely, these theoretical views are directly compared. In this special issue, current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form, and directly compared and discussed in a debate, which is reported at the end of each article. As a result, new exciting questions and challenges arise. These questions and challenges, reported in this introductory article, can arguably pave the way to new empirical studies and theoretical developments on the nature of abstract concepts.
我们处理抽象概念的能力是人类认知最有趣的能力之一。尽管如此，我们对这些概念是如何在大脑中形成、处理和表现的知之甚少。例如，由于抽象概念并不指定可以通过我们的身体来体验的指称，因此，知觉经验在塑造它们的内容方面的作用仍然存在争议。目前的理论提出了各种替代解释来回答“抽象概念在人类思维中是如何表现的”这一问题。这些观点指出了在塑造抽象概念内容方面起重要作用的特定语义信息流，例如基于情境的信息（例如，Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings，）、情感信息（Kousta、Vigliocco、Vinson、Andrews 和 Del Campo，）和语言信息（Louwerse，）。很少有这些理论观点直接进行比较。在本期特刊中，当前的观点以其最新和最先进的形式呈现，并在辩论中直接进行比较和讨论，讨论结果报告在每篇文章的末尾。因此，新的令人兴奋的问题和挑战出现了。这些问题和挑战，在这篇介绍性文章中进行了报道，可以说为抽象概念本质的新的实证研究和理论发展铺平了道路。
