在过去的十年里,一种越来越流行的观点是,人类的概念系统是可塑的,动态,上下文相关,和任务相关,也就是说,灵活。在灵活的概念表示框架内,概念表示是临时构建的,形成一个不同的,每次发生时的特殊实例化。在这次审查中,我们仔细研究神经认知文献,以更好地理解这种灵活性的本质。首先,我们确定了这些表示的一些关键特征。接下来,我们通过解决这个框架中的一些悬而未决的问题来考虑这些灵活的表示是如何构建的:我们回顾了一个古老的问题,即如何将灵活性与对可共享的稳定定义的明显需求相协调,以锚定含义并达成相互理解,以及一些我们认为至关重要的新问题,即,灵活表示之间关系的性质,特征显著性在激活中的作用,以及全或无功能激活的可行性。我们建议用构成概念表示的信息的激活程度和可能性的问题来代替关于必须激活的定义稳定核心的辩论。我们依靠已发表的作品来表明(1)先前的特征显著性很重要,(2)功能激活可分级,(3)根据当前需求对先验信息进行贝叶斯更新,为如何构造灵活的表示提供了可行的说明。该提议提供了一种理论机制,用于将变化的瞬时上下文合并到构造的表示中,同时仍然保留了一些概念的构成含义。
A view that has been gaining prevalence over the past decade is that the human conceptual system is malleable, dynamic, context-dependent, and task-dependent, that is, flexible. Within the flexible conceptual representation framework, conceptual representations are constructed ad hoc, forming a different, idiosyncratic instantiation upon each occurrence. In this review, we scrutinize the neurocognitive literature to better understand the nature of this flexibility. First, we identify some key characteristics of these representations. Next, we consider how these flexible representations are constructed by addressing some of the open questions in this framework: We review the age-old question of how to reconcile flexibility with the apparent need for shareable stable definitions to anchor meaning and come to mutual understanding, as well as some newer questions we find critical, namely, the nature of relations among flexible representations, the role of feature saliency in activation, and the viability of all-or-none feature activations. We suggest replacing the debate about the existence of a definitional stable core that is obligatorily activated with a question of the degree and probability of activation of the information constituting a conceptual representation. We rely on published works to suggest that (1) prior featural salience matters, (2) feature activation may be graded, and (3) Bayesian updating of prior information according to current demands offers a viable account of how flexible representations are constructed. This proposal provides a theoretical mechanism for incorporating a changing momentary context into a constructed representation, while still preserving some of the concept\'s constituent meaning.