The capacity to use abstract concepts is crucial for our species. While until some years ago abstract concepts were defined only in a negative way, recently some proposal have emerged, showing that interoceptive and social experience might characterize more abstract than concrete concepts. The project focuses on interoception and metacognition in abstract concepts, i.e. in concepts like 'freedom', that do not have a single, perceptually bound referent.
It starts from the hypothesis that, while concrete concepts might be more grounded in exteroceptive experience, interoception and social metacognition (the awareness of the inadequacy of our knowledge and the need to rely on the competences and help of others) might play a major role for abstract concepts, and especially for some kinds of abstract concepts. It is organized into 2 work-packages (WPs). The aim of WP1 is to investigate whether interoceptive sensitivity characterizes more abstract than concrete concepts, and whether it is modulated by the kind of abstract concept (e.g. playing a major role for emotional and social than for numerical ACs). The aim of WP2 is to verify the role played by social metacognition for abstract compared to concrete concepts, and to investigate whether the activation of this mechanism is modulated by the kind of ACs (e.g. whether it plays a major role for mental states than for other ACs) and it changes in clinical populations. Studies on adults and children and with clinical populations (children with autistic spectrum disorder, patients who use rumination) will be conducted with a variety of techniques and methods (questionnaires, behavioral studies, EEG, TMS, thermal imaging camera). The project adopts an interdisciplinary approach, and has implications relevant for a variety of different areas: from cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience, to social neuroscience, to clinical psychology.
The novelty of the current project is multifold.
Interoception and abstract concepts. While in the last years studies on ACs are proliferating and the interest for interoception is growing, to our knowledge no study so far has explicitly focused on the role of interoception for characterizing ACs, and has addressed the issue, of whether interoception plays a major role for specific kinds of ACs (emotional rather than numerical ones).
While the role of the imageability (Paivio, 1986) and of the different perceptual modalities (Connell & Lynott, 2012; 2013) has been often underlined while approaching ACs, inner grounding is so far a 'forgotten modality' in the study of ACs. This is likely due to the fact that ACs have mainly be conceived of as non-concrete concepts, rather than as endowed with their own specificities and properties. Only recently authors are starting to conceive of ACs in their specificities such as the importance of linguistic, social and emotional experience, and of inner grounding.
Still, the fact that the role played by inner grounding for ACs has been overseen is awkward for a number of reasons. The first is that ACs include concepts that are likely to be grounded in inner processes owing to their content, such as mental state concepts (Desai et al., 2018; Dreyer & Pulvermueller, 2017) and emotional concepts (Moseley et al., 2011). The second is that inner grounding is likely to be an important mechanism differentiating abstract from concrete concepts - ACs are relational and more complex, thus they are more likely to involve the support of inner thought and inner speech.
To our knowledge the only study referring to inner properties in relation to ACs was performed by Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings (2005), who proposed on the basis of a feature generation task that ACs would evoke more introspective properties than concrete concepts. Some recent theories, as the AEA one (Kousta et al., 2011; Vigliocco et al., 2013), have underlined that the emotional dimension is fundamental for the representation of ACs, and contend that emotional valence would characterize not only a specific kind of ACs, i.e. emotional ones, but would be pivotal for ACs of all kinds. Very recently, in a study on more than 30.000 English words Connell et al. (2018) measured naming times and lexical decision showing how interoception is an important, and so far forgotten, perceptual modality for ACs, in particular for emotional ones. In the same vein, in a recent study (Villani et al., submitted) on different kinds of ACs we found that inner grounding is fundamental for ACs, but its role is modulated by the kind of concept: this experience is fundamental for emotional ACs , but it is not for physical and numerical ACs.
For current research it is thus paramount to understand the role played by interoceptive experience both for ACs, and for specific kinds of ACs.
Importantly, to the best of our knowledge no study so far has investigated the role of interoception for ACs manipulating the inner bodily signals, i.e. measuring heart beat and affective touch during evaluation and processing of different kinds of concepts, in children, adults and clinical populations, as the present project aims to do.
Social metacognition and abstract concepts. The role played by metacognition, and its possible embodied counterpart, the activation of the mouth motor system, has been so far neglected in current literature on ACs. Shea (2018) has proposed the distinction between implicit deference, the feeling that we need to refer to others in using a concept, and explicit deference, judgment on our own mental states, that can lead us to judge as inadequate the knowledge of a given concept. Borghi et al. (2018) have coined the term of 'social metacognition', to link a metacognitive mechanism to the activation of the mouth motor system during ACs processing: being aware of the inadequacy of our concepts, we would prepare ourselves to recur to the competence of others. The novelty of the present project consists in investigating in depth this mechanism for the first time, and in studying how it is modulated in groups of different ages and in clinical populations.
Methods. A further novelty of the project is represented by the interdisciplinary approach, that combines cognitive psychology, cognitive (neuro)science and social neuroscience, developmental and clinical psychology, as the competence of the participants and of the collaborators testify.