Humans can understand thousands of abstract words, even when they do not have clearly perceivable referents. Recent views highlight an important role of social experience in grounding of abstract concepts and sub-kinds of abstract concepts, but empirical work in this area is still in its early stages. In the present study, a picture-word semantic priming paradigm was employed to investigate the contribution effect of social experience that is provided by real-life pictures to social abstract concepts and emotional abstract concepts. Using (...) a lexical decision task, we examined responses to picture-SA word pairs and picture-EA word pairs in social/emotional semantically related and unrelated conditions. All pairs shared either positive or negative valence. The results showed quicker responses to positive SA and EA words that were preceded by related vs. unrelated prime pictures. Specifically, positive SA words were facilitated by the corresponding social scene pictures, whereas positive EA words were facilitated by pictures depict the corresponding facial expressions and gestures. However, such facilitatory effect was not observed in negative picture-SA/EA word conditions. This pattern of results suggests that a facilitatory effect of social experience on abstract concepts varies with different sub-kinds of abstract concepts, that seems to be limited to positive SA concepts. Overall, our findings confirm the crucial role of social experience for abstract concepts and further suggest that not all abstract concepts can benefit from social experience, at least in the semantic priming. (shrink)

It is a well-established fact in representationalist cognitive science that concrete concepts influence human perception. In radical, anti-representationalist cognitive science, however, the case is far from clear. One reason for this is that proponents of Radical Enactivism yet have to clarify whether perceptual activity involving concepts is bound to rely on mental content or if it instantiates basic, contentfree cognition. The purpose of this paper is to show that concept-involving perception instantiates REC-style basic cognition. The paper begins by considering ‘cognitive (...) projection’ as the term is introduced by Distributed Cognition research. Although being introduced as a means for exploring concept-based perception in non-representationalist terms, I argue that ‘cognitive projection’ comes with mentalist overtones and unclarities concerning its linguistic basis. With the purpose of overcoming these shortcomings, I unfold a REC-friendly reading of Wittgenstein’s writings on aspect perception, arguing that basic concept-involving perception is an instantiation of basic cognition. Concludingly, with the aim of ensuring compatibility, I make a connection between conceptual aspect perception and the REC notion of attentional anchors. The latter has been introduced to explore the role of material artefacts in the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational design but has, I submit, the potential for being extended to other practical contexts. (shrink)