Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speaker: Dr Sarah Solomon

Title: Relating conceptual structure with flexible concept use

Abstract: Our mental words are populated with concepts—rich representations of knowledge about things in the world. In language, words are used to refer to these concepts and to communicate with others. This is quite impressive given that a word does not activate the same information each time it is used: conceptual information is flexibly activated based on the context. In this talk, I will discuss research in which we used behavioral, fMRI, and computational methods to explore the kinds of conceptual structure that can support flexible concept use. In particular I will discuss the importance of feature-based conceptual structure, the role of feature uncertainty in the comprehension of combined concepts, and the brain regions that are likely associated with flexible concept use.