No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Abstraction still holds its feet on the ground
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2020
Abstract
In view of current scientific knowledge, it seems premature to hypothesize a qualitative distinction between processes, networks, and structures involved in abstract processes from those based on perception, episodic, or procedural memories. Predictive thought and mental travel strongly rely, at different levels of consciousness, on past and ongoing sensory input, bodily information (e.g., interoception), and the results of perceptual elaboration.
- Type
- Open Peer Commentary
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Aglioti, S. M. & Pazzaglia, M. (2010) Representing actions through their sound. Experimental Brain Research 206(2):141–51. doi: 10.1007/s00221-010-2344-x.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Aglioti, S. M. & Pazzaglia, M. (2011) Sounds and scents in (social) action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(2):47–55. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.12.003.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Pezzulo, G. & Tummolini, L. (2019b) Words as social tools: Flexibility, situatedness, language and sociality in abstract concepts: Reply to comments on “Words as social tools: Language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts.” Physics of Life Reviews 29:178–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Y. C. & Spence, C. (2010) When hearing the bark helps to identify the dog: Semantically-congruent sounds modulate the identification of masked pictures. Cognition 114(3):389–404. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.012.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connell, L., Lynott, D. & Banks, B. (2018) Interoception: The forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170143. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0143.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ghazanfar, A. A. & Lemus, L. (2010) Multisensory integration: Vision boosts information through suppression in auditory cortex. Current Biology 20(1):R22–23. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.046.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huth, A. G., De Heer, W. A., Griffiths, T. L., Theunissen, F. E. & Gallant, J. L. (2016) Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature 532(7600):453–58. doi: 10.1038/nature17637.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seo, H. S., Arshamian, A., Schemmer, K., Scheer, I., Sander, T., Ritter, G. & Hummel, T. (2010) Cross-modal integration between odors and abstract symbols. Neuroscience Letters 478(3):175–78. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.05.011.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Troche, J., Crutch, S. J. & Reilly, J. (2017) Defining a conceptual topography of word concreteness: Clustering properties of emotion, sensation, and magnitude among 750 English words. Frontiers in Psychology 8(1787). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01787.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Walla, P. (2008) Olfaction and its dynamic influence on word and face processing: Cross-modal integration. Progress in Neurobiology 84(2):192–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zhou, G. Y., Lane, G., Cooper, S. L., Kahnt, T. & Zelano, C. (2019) Characterizing functional pathways of the human olfactory system. Elife 8. doi: ARTN e47177. 10.7554/eLife.47177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Target article
Above and beyond the concrete: The diverse representational substrates of the predictive brain
Related commentaries (31)
A challenge for predictive coding: Representational or experiential diversity?
A modern materialist approach to abstraction, concreteness, and explanation in cognition
Above and beyond the content: Feelings influence mental simulations
Abstracting abstraction in development and cognitive ability
Abstracting reward
Abstraction still holds its feet on the ground
Abstraction: An alternative neurocognitive account of recognition, prediction, and decision making
Abstractions, predictions, and speech sound representations
Are all distances created equal? Insights from developmental psychology
Catching the intangible: a role for emotion?
Cognitive representations and the predictive brain depend heavily on the environment
Dynamic hierarchical cognition: Music and language demand further types of abstracta
Experiences of liking versus ideas about liking
Is it always so? Unexpected visions
Language as a mental travel guide
Mind wandering as data augmentation: How mental travel supports abstraction
Neuronal codes for predictive processing in cortical layers
On the implications of object permanence: Microhistorical insights from Piaget's new theory
Other and other waters in the river: Autism and the futility of prediction
Prospection does not imply predictive processing
Representation and agency
Representation, abstraction, and simple-minded sophisticates
Scale-free architectures support representational diversity
Shared reality and abstraction: The social nature of predictive models
Simulation across representation: The interplay of schemas and simulation-based inference on different levels of abstraction
Simulation and the predictive brain
Structured event complexes are the primary representation in the human prefrontal cortex
Successful simulation requires bridging levels of abstraction
The productive mind: Creativity as a source of abstract mental representations
The role of sleep in the formation and updating of abstract mental representations
Touch me if you can: The intangible but grounded nature of abstract concepts
Author response
Above and beyond “Above and beyond the concrete”