Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Athough both prepositional and perceptual representations are viewed as central to human memory, propositional representations are typically assumed to underlie conceptual knowledge. Propositional models of concepts, such as feature lists, frames, and networks, embody this assumption. Recent theories across the cognitive sciences, however, have proposed that perceptual representations are central to conceptual processing. These perceptual representations are postulated to be schematic, dynamic, and multimodal images that have been extracted from perception and experience. In the experiment reported here, we used the property verification task to determine the extent to which people use perceptual representations during conceptual processing. A regression analysis revealed two kinds of evidence for the spontaneous use of perceptual representations: First, neutral and imagery subjects showed a similar pattern of reaction times on the task. Second, perceptual variables, such as the property size, predicted verification times.