Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many theories of semantic memory assume that categories spontaneously emerge from commonalities in the way we per-ceive and interact with the world around us. However, efforts to test this assumption computationally have been hamperedby use of abstracted features without clear sensorimotor grounding and over-reliance on small samples of concepts from alimited number of categories. Taking a radically different approach, we examined whether categorical structure emergesspontaneously from the latent structure of sensorimotor experience by creating a fully-grounded multidimensional senso-rimotor space at the scale of a full-size human conceptual system (i.e., 11 sensorimotor dimensions x 40,000 concepts).We found evidence for (a) a high-level separation of abstract and concrete categories (which was not enhanced by theinclusion of affective information); (b) a hierarchical structure of concrete concepts that separated categories commonlyimpaired in double dissociations, such as fruit/vegetables, animals, tools, and musical instruments; and (c) a flatter hi-erarchy of abstract concepts that separated categories such as negative emotions, units of time, social relationships, andpolitical systems. These findings demonstrate that grounded sensorimotor information is fundamental to the representationof all conceptual knowledge.