Abstract concepts and the suppression of arbitrary episodic context

Abstract

Context is important for abstract concept processing, but a mechanism by which it is encoded and re-instantiated with concepts is unclear. We used a source-memory paradigm to determine whether episodic context is attended more when processing abstract concepts. Experiment 1 presented abstract and concrete words in colored boxes at encoding. At test, memory for the frame color was worse for abstract concepts, counter to our predictions. Experiment 2 showed the same pattern when colored boxes were replaced with male and female voices. Experiment 3 presented words from encoding in the same or different box color to determine whether a greater advantage is conferred by context retention in memory for abstract concepts. There was instead a disadvantage: abstract concepts were less likely to be identified when the encoding color was retained at test. Concrete concepts are more sensitive to simple episodic detail, and in abstract concepts, arbitrary context may be suppressed.

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

“…Indeed, we have observed evidence 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. that this may be true: in a recent study (Davis et al, 2019), arbitrary episodic detail was operationalized as an arbitrary context paired with some stimulus of interest, for instance, an arbitrarily colored box (e.g., red or green) surrounding a word, or different speakers presenting each word from a list (e.g., male or female). Memory for the context (whether boxes or voices) was worse for abstract compared to concrete concepts, and when we simply presented those concepts in either the same or a different context (here, box color) from that seen at encoding, people were worse at recognizing abstract (but not concrete) concepts when they were presented in the same context than when presented in a different one during a recognition phase.…”