Abstract Concepts: Structure, Processing and Modelling

Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. For example, because abstract concepts do not designate referents that can be experienced through our body, the role of perceptual experiences in shaping their content remains controversial. Current theories suggest a variety of alternative explanations to the question 'how abstract concepts are represented in the human mind'. These views pinpoint specific streams of semantic information that would play a prominent role in shaping the content of abstract concepts, such as: situation-based information (e.g. Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005), affective information (Kousta et al. 2011), and linguistic information (Louwerse, 2011). Rarely, these theoretical views are directly compared. In this special issue, current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form, and directly compared and discussed in a debate, which is reported at the end of each article. As a result, new exciting questions and challenges arise. These questions and challenges, reported in this introductory article, can arguably pave the way to new empirical studies and theoretical developments on the nature of abstract concepts.