Certainly, statistical regularities are associated with concepts that can be viewed as Bayesian priors. If this account is correct, then what we learn from studying concepts in isolation is likely to be limited and perhaps distorted. By situated action, we not only mean action per se, but all the cognition that supports it, including the comprehension of situations and the production of predictions that make human action possible (as discussed later in further detail also see ). To support situated action, a concept is typically coupled with its referents in the body and world, along with other concepts that represent additional situational elements and their integration-it doesn't operate in isolation. As a consequence, theories typically focus on the representational structures and processes that become active for concepts cued in isolation.įrom the perspective of situated cognition, however, a concept supports the effective action of an embodied agent embedded in the physical and social environments. From this perspective, a concept is simply the information that becomes active when processing cues for it. A word for a concept is presented (or sometimes a pictured instance), and the information that becomes active is assessed with behavioural and/or neural measures. Most typically, researchers study concepts in isolation. The importance of studying abstract concepts during situated action This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’.ġ. We propose that studying concepts in the context of situated action is necessary for establishing complete accounts of them, and that continuing to study concepts in isolation is likely to provide relatively incomplete and distorted accounts. Whereas concepts for situational elements originate in distributed neural networks that provide continual feeds about components of situations, concepts for situational integrations originate in association areas that establish temporal co-occurrence relations between situational elements, both external and internal. In this framework, the concrete versus abstract distinction between concepts is no longer useful, with two other distinctions becoming important instead: (i) external versus internal situational elements, (ii) situational elements versus situational integrations. As a consequence, individual concepts are most basically represented within patterns of concepts that become entrained with specific kinds of physical situations. Over time, frequent patterns of co-occurring concepts within situations become established in memory as situated conceptualizations, conditioning the conceptual system and producing habitual patterns of conceptual processing. To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-directed action follows. From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |