Towards a distributed account of conceptual knowledge
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Updated: Oct 7, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
1Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EB, Cambridge, UK
Abstract:
How is conceptual knowledge organized and represented? Are domains (such as living things) and categories (such as tools, fruit) represented explicitly or can domain and category structure emerge out of a distributed system? Taken at face value, evidence from brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies suggests that conceptual knowledge is explicitly structured in independent content-based stores. However, recent analyses of the fine-grained details of semantic impairments, combined with research using connectionist modelling, suggest a different picture - one in which concepts are represented as patterns of activation over multiple semantic properties within a unitary distributed system. Within this context, category-specific deficits emerge as a result of differences in the structure and content of concepts rather than from explicit divisions of conceptual knowledge in separate stores.
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