Situated Conceptualization
Lawrence W. Barsalou
Department of Psychology
Emory University
One way of construing brain organization is as a collection of systems that processes the components of a situation in parallel, including its setting, agents, objects, actions, and internal states. In a given situation, each situational component is conceptualized individually, as when components of eating in a kitchen are conceptualized as kitchen (setting), diner (agent), food (food), chewing (action), and hunger (internal state). In turn, configural concepts integrate these individual conceptualizations into larger structures that conceptualize the larger situation, such as eating and meal. From this perspective, a situated conceptualization is a distributed record of conceptual processing in a given situation, across all the relevant component systems. On later occasions, a situated conceptualization can become active to simulate the respective situation in its absence (e.g., activating a situated conceptualization to simulate eating). From this perspective, the concept that represents a category, such as kitchen or eating, is the collection of situated conceptualizations that has accumulated from processing the category across situations, similar to exemplar theories. The utility of situated conceptualization as a general theoretical construct is illustrated for situated action, social embodiment, social mirroring, and emotion, along with the central role of pattern-completion inference.