Sharpening and Broadening Concepts across Contexts

Authors: Alexandra Skoczylas, Colleen Duggan, Sarah Solomon

Field of Study: Science, Technology, Engineering, and/or Math

Faculty Mentors: Sarah Solomon

Easel: 34

Timeslot: Midday

Abstract: Thinking about a spoon might usually activate its most relevant features (e.g., handle) but you might only consider that a spoon can be reflective if you find yourself in need of a make-shift mirror. What drives this flexible shift of feature activations? One possibility is that an object’s representation undergoes a sharpening or broadening depending on context. To test this theory, participants will be in either a kitchen or garden “context” and judge whether kitchen or garden concepts (e.g., “knife”, “shovel”) relate to a characteristic or non-characteristic feature (e.g., knife-sharp vs. knife-shiny). A stimulus set was carefully designed, which includes kitchen and garden concepts, their associated features, and naturalistic kitchen and garden imagesto manipulate context. The validity of this stimulus set is demonstrated, laying the groundwork to test the hypothesis that conceptual flexibility is in part explained by a context-driven sharpening and broadening of conceptual representations.