Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A single concept can manifest in many varied forms,depending on the context in which it is activated. That is,concepts appear to be flexible rather than static. Here weimplement a compositional model of conceptual knowledge inwhich basic-level concepts are represented as graphtheoretical networks, with the specific goal of quantifyingconceptual flexibility. We collect within-concept statisticsusing online participants, construct network models, andvalidate these models in a classification analysis. We thenextract network measures and find that network diversity andcore-periphery structure correspond to conceptual flexibilityand stability, respectively. These results suggest that acompositional network model can be used to extract formalmeasures that are interpretable and useful in the study ofconceptual knowledge.