ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2016
Three symbol ungrounding problems: Abstract concepts and the future of embodied cognition.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visuospatial or verbal-spatial codes? The different effect of two secondary tasks on the power-space associations during two explicit power judgment tasks.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Multimodal input for vocabulary learning: Chinese EFL learners' perceived effectiveness across input combinations, word types, and proficiency levels.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Indirect experiential grounding: semantic similarity of abstract scientific concepts is reflected in activity patterns in visual and motor cortex.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Hierarchical Organization of Bilateral Prefrontal-Basal Ganglia Circuits for Response Inhibition Control.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The experiential basis of concepts: integrating embodied and enactive accounts.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Space as a mental toolbox in the representation of meaning.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Symbol ungrounding: what the successes (and failures) of large language models reveal about human cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Breakdown of category-specific word representations in a brain-constrained neurocomputational model of semantic dementia.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neurobiological mechanisms for language, symbols and concepts: Clues from brain-constrained deep neural networks.Progress in neurobiology · 2023Review
- A Review of Studies Supporting Metaphorical Embodiment.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Cross-domain semantic alignment: concrete concepts are more abstract than you think.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Rethinking the role of language in embodied cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Effect of the level of task abstraction on the transfer of knowledge from virtual environments in cognitive and motor tasks.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Abstractness emerges progressively over the second year of life.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Heterogenous abstract concepts: is "ponder" different from "dissolve"?Psychological research · 2022Article
- Is justice grounded? How expertise shapes conceptual representation of institutional concepts.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Concrete constraints on abstract concepts-editorial.Psychological research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A great deal of research has focused on the question of whether or not concepts are embodied as a rule. Supporters of embodiment have pointed to studies that implicate affective and sensorimotor systems in cognitive tasks, while critics of embodiment have offered nonembodied explanations of these results and pointed to studies that implicate amodal systems. Abstract concepts have tended to be viewed as an important test case in this polemical debate. This essay argues that we need to move beyond a pretheoretical notion of abstraction. Against the background of current research and theory, abstract concepts do not pose a single, unified problem for embodied cognition but, instead, three distinct problems: the problem of generalization, the problem of flexibility, and the problem of disembodiment. Identifying these problems provides a conceptual framework for critically evaluating, and perhaps improving upon, recent theoretical proposals.
Indexed as
Identifiers
25832355What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.