Implicit and Explicit Measures of Multisensory Mental Representations and Object Knowledge Acquisition for Three Distinct Categories

• Main Author: Edwards, Erica S
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2021
• Subjects: Cognitive psychology; Psychology; Quantitative psychology
• ISBN: 9798460421343

The relationship between features and concept representations has been the focus of much research. Debate has centered around determining whether humans form conceptual categories by identifying featural co-occurrence between category members or through a more sensory approach. Past studies have primarily focused on the importance of visual and functional information in object knowledge processing (Warrington & McCarthy, 1983) and some even touch on auditory processing (Hairston, 2008), but the remaining modalities have been virtually ignored. I have chosen to examine the acquisition of multisensory representations for novel objects within existing categories in a longitudinal study that uses lexical measures of explicit concept knowledge and more implicit brain-based measures of concept knowledge collected before and after interacting with objects. I analyzed the types of features generated during a feature production task, and brain activity during a multisensory imagery task to explore how sensory modality and familiarity influence conceptual knowledge differently for three manipulable concrete object (i.e., non-abstract) categories. Here, I argue that object affordances, which influence the type of sensory information attended to and how concepts are represented. Within the feature production task, I found category-specific unique modality profiles in the types of features produced for each category. Within the fMRI task, regional activation difference indicated that individual differences in imagery vividness influence mental representations. These findings shed light on how and why we assign objects to different or shared categories, what information is important when we learn about and categorize novel objects, and what aspects of categorical knowledge might be impacted by brain disease.