Conceptual structure: Towards an integrated neurocognitive account

How are the meanings of concepts represented and processed? We present a cognitive model of conceptual representations and processing - the Conceptual Structure Account (CSA; Tyler & Moss, 2001) - as an example of a distributed, feature-based approach. In a first section, we describe the CSA and evaluate relevant neuropsychological and experimental behavioral data. We discuss studies using linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli, which are both presumed to access the same conceptual system. We then take the CSA as a framework for hypothesising how conceptual knowledge is represented and processed in the brain. This neuro-cognitive approach attempts to integrate the distributed feature-based characteristics of the CSA with a distributed and feature-based model of sensory object processing. Based on a review of relevant functional imaging and neuropsychological data, we argue that distributed accounts of feature-based representations have considerable explanatory power, and that a cognitive model of conceptual representations is needed to understand their neural bases.