The Human Conceptual System

The human conceptual system contains people's knowledge about the world. Rather than containing holistic images of experience, the conceptual system repre-sents components of experience, including knowledge about settings, objects, people, actions, events, mental states, properties, and relations. Componential knowledge in the conceptual system supports a wide vari-ety of basic cognitive operations, including categorization, inference, the representation of propositions, and the productive creation of novel conceptualizations. In turn, these basic operations support the spectrum of complex cognitive activities, including high-level perception, attention, memory, lan-guage, thought, and socio-cultural cognition. Traditional theories of Good-Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), such as semantic memory, constitute the dominant approach to the conceptual system. More recently, researchers have developed alter-native approaches, including connectionist theories and simulation/embodied/situated theories. i Recording versus interpretative systems The distinction between a recording sys-tem and an interpretive system is central to characterizing conceptual systems (e.g.