Inge Boot
PhD student
Burgemeester Oudlaan 50
T-Building, Room T12-43
Phone: 010-4082946
i.boot@fsw.eur.nl
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Inge Boot | |
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The role of metaphors in the representation of abstract concepts People have to represent concepts in their mind in order to deal with the concepts in the real world. This project investigates how people mentally represent abstract concepts. The embodied cognition framework states that concepts are represented in terms of perception and action. This works fine for concrete concepts (e.g., car, rose) but becomes more complicated for abstract concepts (e.g., love, health). A suggestion as to how abstract concepts might be represented comes from cognitive linguistics. In language, metaphors are often used for abstract concepts. For example love can be represented as a journey (e.g., our relationship is at a crossroads). Thus, the concrete situation of travelling along a path is used as a metaphor for an abstract concept as love. Lakoff and Johnson (see also Gibbs, 1994, 2005) see this metaphorical language as a reflection of metaphorical mapping of abstract concepts in the mind. The metaphor of an abstract concept, e.g. love refers to a concrete physical experience, e.g. journey. In this way, embodied theories can explain how the perceptual and motor systems can be used in embodied image schemas that represent the abstract concepts. Most studies that have investigated the role of image schemas were interested in how people process metaphorical language, and did not directly address the representation of abstract concepts (Lakoff and Johnson,1980; Allbritton, McKoon, and Gerrig, 1995). We will focus in this study on the representation of abstract concepts by testing whether image schemas are activated by these concepts, and if prior activation of image schemas facilitates processing of abstract concepts. In a priming paradigm stimuli describing abstract concepts will be preceded by sentences, animations, or subject-performed actions with the same or different image schema. Priming for same image schema stimuli would provide evidence for this theory. Lab page: memorylab |
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| Boot, I. & Pecher, D. (in press). Representation of categories:Metaphorical use of the container schema. Experimental Psychology. | |
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| Boot, I. & Pecher, D (2010). Similarity is closeness: metaphorical mapping in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 942-954. abstract | |
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| Pecher, D., Van Dantzig, S., Boot, I., Zanolie, K., & Huber, D. E. (2010). Congruency between word position and meaning is caused by task Induced spatial attention. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 1-8. abstract | ||
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| Boot, I. & Pecher, D. (2008). Word recognition is affected by the meaning of orthographic neighbors: Evidence from semantic decision tasks. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 375-393. abstract | |
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| Zeelenberg, R., Boot, I., & Pecher, D. (2005). Activating the critical lure during study is unnecessary for false recognition. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 316-326. abstract | |