Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2019 Aug;51(4):1717-1736. doi: 10.3758/s13428-019-01217-1.
The same concept can mean different things or be instantiated in different forms, depending on context, suggesting a degree of flexibility within the conceptual system. We propose that a feature-based network model can be used to capture and predict this flexibility. We modeled individual concepts (e.g., BANANA, BOTTLE) as graph-theoretical networks, in which properties (e.g., YELLOW, SWEET) were represented as nodes and their associations as edges. In this framework, networks capture within-concept statistics that reflect how properties relate to one another across instances of a concept. We extracted formal measures of these networks that capture different aspects of network structure, and explored whether a concept's network structure relates to its flexibility of use. To do so, we compared network measures to a text-based measure of semantic diversity, as well as to empirical data from a figurative-language task and an alternative-uses task. We found that network-based measures were predictive of the text-based and empirical measures of flexible concept use, highlighting the ability of this approach to formally capture relevant characteristics of conceptual structure. Conceptual flexibility is a fundamental attribute of the cognitive and semantic systems, and in this proof of concept we reveal that variations in concept representation and use can be formally understood in terms of the informational content and topology of concept networks.
相同的概念在不同的语境下可能有不同的含义或表现形式，这表明概念系统具有一定的灵活性。我们提出，基于特征的网络模型可以用于捕捉和预测这种灵活性。我们将个体概念（例如，BANANA、BOTTLE）建模为图论网络，其中属性（例如，YELLOW、SWEET）表示为节点，它们的关联表示为边。在这个框架中，网络捕捉到了反映概念实例之间属性相互关系的概念内统计数据。我们提取了这些网络的形式化度量，以捕捉网络结构的不同方面，并探索了概念的网络结构与其使用的灵活性之间的关系。为此，我们将网络度量与基于文本的语义多样性度量以及来自比喻语言任务和替代用途任务的实证数据进行了比较。我们发现，基于网络的度量可以预测基于文本的和实证的灵活概念使用度量，这突出了这种方法能够正式捕捉概念结构的相关特征的能力。概念灵活性是认知和语义系统的基本属性，在这个概念验证中，我们揭示了概念表示和使用的变化可以根据概念网络的信息内容和拓扑结构来进行形式化理解。
