There Are Many Ways to See the Forest for the Trees

Abstract

Abstraction is a useful process for broadening mental horizons, integrating new experiences, and communicating information to others. Much attention has been directed at identifying the causes and consequences of abstraction across the subdisciplines of psychology. Despite this attention, an integrative review of the methods that are used for studying abstraction is missing from the literature. The current article aims to fill this gap in several ways. First, we highlight the different ways in which abstraction has been defined in the literature and then suggest an integrative definition. Second, we provide a tour of the different ways abstraction has been manipulated and measured over the years. Finally, we highlight considerations for researchers in choosing methods for their own research.

Modulation of taxonomic (versus thematic) similarity judgments and product choices by inducing local and global processing

“…We induced either a local attentional focus (focusing on small details or parts of objects) or a global attentional focus (attending to the "whole" rather than individual parts). Such perceptual processing is linked with conceptual processing and has previously been used widely to induce more abstract (global) or more concrete (local) thinking (Burgoon, Henderson & Markman, 2013, Dijkstra et al, 2012, McCrea, Wieber & Myers, 2012. We predicted that local and global processing would therefore induce taxonomic and thematic thinking, respectively.…”

“…Processing conceptual information globally or locally has also been linked to processing the perceptual world in a global (e.g.. attention to the whole display) or local (e.g., attention to parts of the display) manner (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994;Forster & Dannenberg, 2010). A wealth of research has therefore looked at manipulating attentional focus in order to Local/Global Processing and Similarity 7 investigate its effect on social or cognitive judgements (for a review see Burgoon, Henderson & Markman, 2013). This raises the possibility that inducing a local or global perceptual focus could influence preference for taxonomic or thematic relations.…”

“…Thus it is about considering an object as a whole in terms of its potential uses and functions and considering how these relate to other objects. This type of abstraction is aligned with what is often called global processing (e.g., Burgoon, Henderson & Markman, 2013, Dijkstra et al, 2012, Huntsinger, Clore & Bar_Anan, 2012. In contrast, assessing taxonomic similarity requires focusing on the specific feature attributes of objects and comparing these.…”

“…This style of information processing is more concrete (i.e., less abstract) in nature as it relies upon specific detail of numerous features. The focus on parts rather than the whole means that this type of processing is often referred to as local processing (e.g., Burgoon, Henderson & Markman, 2013, Dijkstra et al, 2012, Huntsinger, Clore & Bar_Anan, 2012. It seems then that thinking thematically or taxonomically might well be aligned with a global and local processing style respectively.…”

“…Therefore taxonomic processing is more reliant on processing differences than thematic processing. Importantly, thinking about similarities or differences has been used as another way of manipulating abstract or concrete thinking alongside inducing a global or local processing (Fujita & Roberts, 2010;Mullen, Pizzuto, & Foels, 2002; for a review see Burgoon, Henderson & Markman, 2013) 1 . We therefore also examine whether inducing a local/global focus leads to a difference in focus on similarities or differences, although this was not the central research question.…”