Taxonomic structure in a set of abstract concepts

Abstract

A large portion of human knowledge comprises “abstract” concepts that lack readily perceivable properties (e.g., “love” and “justice”). Since abstract concepts lack such properties, they have historically been treated as an undifferentiated category of knowledge in the psychology and neuropsychology literatures. More recently, the categorical structure of abstract concepts is often explored using paradigms that ask participants to make explicit judgments about a set of concepts along dimensions that are predetermined by the experimenter. Such methods require the experimenter to select dimensions that are relevant to the concepts and further that people make explicit judgments that accurately reflect their mental representations. We bypassed these requirements by collecting two large sets of non-verbal and implicit judgments about which dimensions are relevant to the similarity between pairs of 50 abstract nouns to determine the representational space of the concepts. We then identified categories within the representational space using a clustering procedure that required categories to replicate across two independent data sets. In a separate experiment, we used automatic semantic priming to further validate the categories and to show that they are an improvement over categories that were defined within the same set of abstract concepts using explicit ratings along predetermined dimensions. These results demonstrate that abstract concepts can be characterized beyond their negative relation to concrete concepts and that categories of abstract concepts can be defined without using a priori dimensions for the concepts or explicit judgments from participants.