The Fluidity of Concept Representations in Human Brain Signals

Abstract: Cognitive theories of human language processing often distinguish between concrete and abstract concepts. In this work, we analyze the discriminability of concrete and abstract concepts in fMRI data using a range of analysis methods. We find that the distinction can be decoded from the signal with an accuracy significantly above chance, but it is not found to be a relevant structuring factor in clustering and relational analyses. From our detailed comparison, we obtain the impression that human concept representations are more fluid than dichotomous categories can capture. We argue that fluid concept representations lead to more realistic models of human language processing because they better capture the ambiguity and underspecification present in natural language use.