Describing the structure of concepts through different feature levels

VIVAS, J.; KOGAN, B.; YERRO, M.; ROMANELLI, S.; VIVAS, L.

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

Taylor and Francis

Año: 2020

2044-5911

It has been suggested that concepts can be recognized based on at least some amount of highly shared features across individuals (i.e., core features). However, the boundaries between those features and less-shared ones (i.e., partially shared and idiosyncratic features) remain unclear. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to operationalize the different levels of the structure of a concept?s meaning and to test the effect of thoselevels on semantic decision latencies. For the first objective, we performed a feature based cued-recall task. For the second one, we designed two speeded verification tasks in which features were presented before and after the concept (i.e., feature-concept and concept-feature condition, respectively). First, results of the cued-recall task allowed us to operationalize core features. Second, we observed that core features were verified faster than partially shared, followed by features, and partially shared features faster than idiosyncratic ones, being features, and that this effect is independent of the order of stimulus presentation in which the stimuli are presented.