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What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Abstract Concepts

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Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts

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Abstract

In this chapter, we present neuroscientific evidence that concrete and abstract concepts are represented, at least in part, differently in the brain. The concreteness and the reversed concreteness effect observed in patients with different pathology and with different location of brain lesions indicate a double dissociation of these effects. On the other hand, they demonstrate that concrete and abstract concepts are processed, at least partially, in parallel. One important factor in the concreteness effect is imageability of the perceived concepts, because careful control for imageability can abolish the concreteness effect or even lead to its reversion. The literature on imaging of processing abstract and concrete concepts is inconsistent. But, one conclusion from imaging is almost certain: Processing of abstract and concrete concepts shares neural representations, which contain also sensorimotor areas. The issue of whether specific representations for abstract and concrete concepts exist is far more difficult, since some studies report more activations of left hemispheric areas and some others report right lateralized activations for abstract concepts. However, there is growing evidence that the semantic system is involved in the processing of abstract words. This is consistent with the WAT approach, according to which abstract concepts activate more the linguistic networks. WAT also predicts that both concrete and abstract words activate the sensorimotor network and the distributed network associated with their meaning/content.

To be an abstract painter does not mean to abstract from naturally occurring opportunities for comparison, but, quite apart from such opportunities, to distil pure pictorial relations: light to dark, colour to light and dark, colour to colour, long to short, broad to narrow, sharp to dull, left–right, above–below, behind–in front, circle to square to triangle.

Paul Klee

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Anna M. Borghi

  2. Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy

    Anna M. Borghi

  3. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Ferdinand Binkofski

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Binkofski, F., Borghi, A.M. (2014). What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Abstract Concepts. In: Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9539-0_5

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