Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Context is important for abstract concept processing, but amechanism by which it is encoded and re-instantiated withconcepts is unclear. We used a source-memory paradigm todetermine whether episodic context is attended more whenprocessing abstract concepts. Experiment 1 presentedabstract and concrete words in colored boxes at encoding. Attest, memory for the frame color was worse for abstractconcepts, counter to our predictions. Experiment 2 showedthe same pattern when colored boxes were replaced withmale and female voices. Experiment 3 presented words fromencoding in the same or different box color to determinewhether a greater advantage is conferred by context retentionin memory for abstract concepts. There was instead adisadvantage: abstract concepts were less likely to beidentified when the encoding color was retained at test.Concrete concepts are more sensitive to simple episodicdetail, and in abstract concepts, arbitrary context may besuppressed.