The role of experience for abstract concepts: Expertise modulates the electrophysiological correlates of mathematical word processing

Abstract concepts and expertise: the case of institutional concepts

Recent views recognize that abstract concepts encompass a variety of exemplars, each relying on different dimensions, including not only sensorimotor but also inner, linguistic, and social experiences. How these dimensions characterize types of abstract concepts, and whether their weight varies across contexts and individuals remains an open question. We investigated the role of linguistic and social situations in the processing of institutional concepts, such as justice, by individuals with different levels of expertise. In a priming study, legal experts and non-experts were asked to respond to target words (go-trials) consisting of different kinds of abstract (institutional, theoretical) and concrete concepts (food, tools) and to ignore filler words (no-go trials). The verbal stimuli were primed by pictures depicting social-action, linguistic-social, linguistic-textual situations, and a control condition. As predicted, critical priming modulated performance on abstract concepts, likely due to their highly context-dependent meaning. Interestingly, we found that the processing of institutional concepts was selectively facilitated by social action prime, suggesting that this situational content may be integrated to support their representation. Crucially, the dialogic context, the linguistic social prime, affected more non-experts than law-experts, who tended to frame institutional concepts as shared idea for regulating social practices. Our results show that linguistic and social inputs become differently salient for institutional concepts representation depending on individual competence.

Effect of the level of task abstraction on the transfer of knowledge from virtual environments in cognitive and motor tasks

Introduction

Virtual environments are increasingly being used for training. It is not fully understood what elements of virtual environments have the most impact and how the virtual training is integrated by the brain on the sought-after skill transference to the real environment. In virtual training, we analyzed how the task level of abstraction modulates the brain activity and the subsequent ability to execute it in the real environment and how this learning generalizes to other tasks. The training of a task under a low level of abstraction should lead to a higher transfer of skills in similar tasks, but the generalization of learning would be compromised, whereas a higher level of abstraction facilitates generalization of learning to different tasks but compromising specific effectiveness.

Methods

A total of 25 participants were trained and subsequently evaluated on a cognitive and a motor task following four training regimes, considering real vs. virtual training and low vs. high task abstraction. Performance scores, cognitive load, and electroencephalography signals were recorded. Transfer of knowledge was assessed by comparing performance scores in the virtual vs. real environment.

Results

The performance to transfer the trained skills showed higher scores in the same task under low abstraction, but the ability to generalize the trained skills was manifested by higher scores under high level of abstraction in agreement with our hypothesis. Spatiotemporal analysis of the electroencephalography revealed higher initial demands of brain resources which decreased as skills were acquired.

Discussion

Our results suggest that task abstraction during virtual training influences how skills are assimilated at the brain level and modulates its manifestation at the behavioral level. We expect this research to provide supporting evidence to improve the design of virtual training tasks.

Academic training increases grounding of scientific concepts in experiential brain systems

Scientific concepts typically transcendent our sensory experiences. Traditional approaches to science education therefore assume a shift towards amodal or verbal knowledge representations during academic training. Grounded cognition approaches, in contrast, predict a maintenance of grounding of the concepts in experiential brain networks or even an increase. To test these competing approaches, the present study investigated the semantic content of scientific psychological concepts and identified the corresponding neural circuits using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in undergraduate psychology students (beginners) and in graduated psychologists (advanced learners). During fMRI scanning, participants were presented with words denoting scientific psychological concepts within a lexical decision task (e.g. "conditioning", "habituation"). The individual semantic property content of each concept was related to brain activity during abstract concept processing. In both beginners and advanced learners, visual and motor properties activated brain regions also involved in perception and action, while mental state properties increased activity in brain regions also recruited by emotional-social scene observation. Only in advanced learners, social constellation properties elicited brain activity overlapping with emotional-social scene observation. In line with grounded cognition approaches, the present results highlight the importance of experiential information for constituting the meaning of abstract scientific concepts during the course of academic training.

Effects of social experience on abstract concepts in semantic priming

Humans can understand thousands of abstract words, even when they do not have clearly perceivable referents. Recent views highlight an important role of social experience in grounding of abstract concepts and sub-kinds of abstract concepts, but empirical work in this area is still in its early stages. In the present study, a picture-word semantic priming paradigm was employed to investigate the contribution effect of social experience that is provided by real-life pictures to social abstract (SA, e.g., friendship, betrayal) concepts and emotional abstract (EA, e.g., happiness, anger) concepts. Using a lexical decision task, we examined responses to picture-SA word pairs (Experiment 1) and picture-EA word pairs (Experiment 2) in social/emotional semantically related and unrelated conditions. All pairs shared either positive or negative valence. The results showed quicker responses to positive SA and EA words that were preceded by related vs. unrelated prime pictures. Specifically, positive SA words were facilitated by the corresponding social scene pictures, whereas positive EA words were facilitated by pictures depict the corresponding facial expressions and gestures. However, such facilitatory effect was not observed in negative picture-SA/EA word conditions. This pattern of results suggests that a facilitatory effect of social experience on abstract concepts varies with different sub-kinds of abstract concepts, that seems to be limited to positive SA concepts. Overall, our findings confirm the crucial role of social experience for abstract concepts and further suggest that not all abstract concepts can benefit from social experience, at least in the semantic priming.

Cognitive and Emotional Appraisal of Motivational Interviewing Statements: An Event-Related Potential Study

The counseling process involves attention, emotional perception, cognitive appraisal, and decision-making. This study aimed to investigate cognitive appraisal and the associated emotional processes when reading short therapists' statements of motivational interviewing (MI). Thirty participants with work injuries were classified into the pre-contemplation (PC, n = 15) or readiness stage of the change group (RD, n = 15). The participants viewed MI congruent (MI-C), MI incongruent (MI-INC), or control phrases during which their electroencephalograms were captured. The results indicated significant Group × Condition effects in the frontally oriented late positive complex (P600/LPC). The P600/LPC's amplitudes were more positive-going in the PC than in the RD group for the MI congruent statements. Within the PC group, the amplitudes of the N400 were significantly correlated (r = 0.607–0.649) with the participants' level of negative affect. Our findings suggest that the brief contents of MI statements alone can elicit late cognitive and emotional appraisal processes beyond semantic processing.

Different types of abstract concepts: evidence from two neurodegenerative patients

The observation of neurological patients showing selective impairments for specific conceptual categories contributed in the development of semantic memory theories. Here, we studied two patients (P01, P02), affected, respectively, by the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (sv-PPA) and Cortico-Basal Syndrome (CBS). An implicit lexical decision task, including concrete (animals, tools) and abstract (emotions, social, quantity) concepts, was administered to patients and healthy controls.P01 and P02 showed an abolished priming effect for social and quantity-related concepts, respectively. This double dissociation suggests a role of different brain areas in representing specific abstract categories, giving insights for current semantic memory theories.

The multidimensionality of abstract concepts: A systematic review

The neuroscientific study of conceptual representation has largely focused on categories of concrete entities (biological entities, tools…), while abstract knowledge has been less extensively investigated. The possible presence of a categorical organization of abstract knowledge is a debated issue. An embodied cognition framework predicts an organization of the abstract domain into different dimensions, grounded in the brain regions engaged by the corresponding experience. Here we review the types of experience that have been proposed to characterize different categories of abstract concepts, and the evidence supporting a corresponding organization derived from behavioural, neuroimaging (i.e., fMRI, MRI, PET, SPECT), EEG, and neurostimulation (i.e., TMS) studies in healthy and clinical populations. The available data provide substantial converging evidence in favour of the presence of distinct neural representations of social and emotional knowledge, mental states and magnitude concepts, engaging brain systems involved in the corresponding experiences. This evidence is supporting an extension of embodied models of semantic memory organization to several types of abstract knowledge.

Time course of brain activity during the processing of motor- and vision-related abstract concepts: flexibility and task dependency

Grounded cognition theories assume that conceptual processing depends on modality-specific brain systems in a context-dependent fashion. Although the relation of abstract concepts to modality-specific systems is less obvious than for concrete concepts, recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies indicated a foundation of abstract concepts in vision and action. However, due to their poor temporal resolution, neuroimaging studies cannot determine whether sensorimotor activity reflects rapid access to conceptual information or later conceptual processes. The present study therefore assessed the time course of abstract concept processing using event-related potentials (ERPs) and compared ERP responses to abstract concepts with a strong relation to vision or action. We tested whether possible ERP effects to abstract word categories would emerge in early or in later time windows and whether these effects would depend on the depth of the conceptual task. In Experiment 1, a shallow lexical decision task, early feature-specific effects starting at 178 ms were revealed, but later effects beyond 300 ms were also observed. In Experiment 2, a deep conceptual decision task, feature-specific effects with an onset of 22 ms were obtained, but effects again extended beyond 300 ms. In congruency with earlier neuroimaging work, the present feature-specific ERP effects suggest a grounding of abstract concepts in modal brain systems. The presence of early and late feature-specific effects indicates that sensorimotor activity observed in neuroimaging experiments may reflect both rapid conceptual and later post-conceptual processing. Results furthermore suggest that a deep conceptual task accelerates access to conceptual sensorimotor features, thereby demonstrating conceptual flexibility.