Metaphors are cognitive and linguistic tools that allow reasoning. They enable the understanding of abstract domains via elements borrowed from concrete ones. The underlying mechanism in metaphorical mapping is the manipulation of concepts. This article proposes another view on what concepts are and their role in metaphor and reasoning. That is, based on current neuroscientific and behavioural evidence, it is argued that concepts are grounded in perceptual and motor experience with physical and social environments. This definition of concepts is then embedded in the Structure-Mapping Theory (SMT), a model for metaphorical processing and reasoning. The blended view of structure-mapping and embodied cognition offers an insight into the processes through which the target domain of a metaphor is embodied or realised in terms of its base domain. The implications of the proposed embodied SMT model are then discussed and future topics of investigation are outlined.
2016From cognitivism to autopoiesis: Towards a computational framework for the embodied mind. Synthese 195(6): 2459–2482.
Barsalou, Lawrence W.
2012The human conceptual system. In Michael J. Spivey, Ken McRae & Marc F. Joanisse (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics, 239–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barsalou, Lawrence W.
2008Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59(1). 617–645.
Borghi, Annan M.
2005Object concepts and action. In Diane Pecher & Rolf A. Zwaan (eds.), Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking, 8–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2017The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin 143(3). 263–292.
Bowdle, Brian F. & Dedre Gentner
2005The career of metaphor. Psychological Review 1121. 193–216.
Brysbaert, Marc, Amy Beth Warriner & Victor Kuperman
2014Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 46(3). 904–911.
Butz, Martin V.
2016Toward a unified sub-symbolic computational theory of cognition. Frontiers in Psychology 7(925).
Carston, Robyn
2002Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cevasco, Jazmin & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2013The importance of studying the role of prosody in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología 45(1). 21–33.
Connell, Louise & Dermot Lynott
2012Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability. Cognition 125(3). 452–465.
Corballis, Michael C.
2017Language evolution: A changing perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21(4). 229–236.
D’Angiulli, Amedeo, Gordon Griffiths & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2015Neural correlates of visualizations of concrete and abstract words in preschool children: A developmental embodied approach. Frontiers in Psychology 6(856).
Dahl, Cristoph & Ikuma Adachi
2013Conceptual metaphorical mapping in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). eLife, 21:e00932.
Desai, Rutvik H., Jeffery R. Binder, Lisa L. Conant, Quintino R. Mano & Mark S. Seidenberg
2011The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23(9). 2376–2386.
Eskine, Kendall J., Natalie A. Kacinik & Jesse J. Prinz
2011A bad taste in the mouth: Gustatory disgust influences moral judgment. Psychological Science 22(3). 295–299.
Evans, Nicholas & Stephen C. Levinson
2009With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5). 472–492.
Falkenhainer, Brian, Kenneth D. Forbus & Dedre Gentner
1989The structure-mapping engine: An algorithm and examples. Artificial Intelligence 411. 1–63.
Fauconnier, Gilles
2001Conceptual blending and analogy. In Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, & Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science, 255–285. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles & George Lakoff
2013On metaphor and blending. Cognitive Semiotics 5(1–2). 393–399.
2016Language and thought are not the same thing: Evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1369(1). 132–153.
Feldman, Jerome & Srinivas Narayanan
2004Embodied meaning in a neural theory of language. Brain and Language 89(2). 385–392.
Freund, Patrick, Karl Friston, Allen J. Thompson, Klaas E. Stephan, John Ashburner, Dominik R. Bach, Zoltan Nagy, Gunther Helms, Bogdan Draganski, Siawoosh Mohammadi, Martin E. Schwab, Armin Curt & Nikaulas Weiskopf
2016Embodied neurology: An integrative framework for neurological disorders. Brain 139(6). 1855–1861.
Gallese, Vittorio
2007Before and below ‘theory of mind’: Embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B, 362(1480). 659–669.
Gallese, Vittorio & George Lakoff
2005The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22(3). 455–479.
Gapenne, Olivier
2014The co-constitution of the self and the world: Action and proprioceptive coupling. Frontiers in Psychology 5(594).
Geake, John G. & Peter C. Hansen
2010Functional neural correlates of fluid and crystallized analogizing. NeuroImage 491. 3489–3497.
Gentner, Dedre
1983Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7(2). 155–170.
Gentner, Dedre
1988Metaphor as structure mapping: The relational shift. Child Development 591. 47–59.
Gentner, Dedre, Brian F. Bowdle, Philip Wolff & Consuelo Boronat
2001Metaphor is like analogy. In Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak & Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.), The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science, 199–253. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W.
1996Why many concepts are metaphorical. Cognition 61(3). 309–319.
Gibbs, Raymond W. & Herbert L. Colston
2012Interpreting Figurative Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W.
2013The real complexities of psycholinguistic research on metaphor. Language Sciences 401. 45–52.
Giora, Rachel
1997Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 8(3). 183–206.
Giora, Rachel
2002Literal vs. figurative meaning: Different or equal. Journal of Pragmatics 341. 457–486.
Glucksberg, Sam
2003The psycholinguistics of metaphor. Trends in Cognitive Science 71. 92–96.
Grice, Paul
1975Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Harnad, Steven
1990The symbol grounding problem. Physica D 42(1–3). 335–346.
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine & Ara Norenzayan
2010The weirdest people in the world?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33(2–3). 61–135.
Huth, Alexander G., Wendy A. de Heer, Thomas L. Griffiths, Fredric E. Theunissen & Jack L. Gallant
2016Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile the human cerebral cortex. Nature 5321. 453–458.
Jackendoff, Ray
1976Towards an explanatory semantic representation. Linguistic Inquiry 7(1). 89–150.
Jamrozik, Aanja, Marguerite McQuire, Eileen R. Cardillo & Anjan Chatterjee
2016Metaphors: Bridging embodiment to abstraction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 1080–1089.
2014Mapping the brain’s metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8(958).
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson
1980The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4(2). 195–208.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson
2003Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, Ronald W.
1986An introduction to cognitive grammar. Cognitive Science 101. 1–40.
Lebois, Lauren A., Christin Wilson‐Mendenhall & Laurence W. Barsalou
2015Are automatic conceptual cores the gold standard of semantic processing? The context-dependence of spatial meaning in grounded congruency effects. Cognitive Science 391. 1764–1801.
Leshinskaya, Anna & Alfonso Caramazza
2016For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 991–1001.
Li, Fengying, Xioyan Guo, Lei Zhu, Zhiliang Yang & Zoltan Dienes
2013Implicit learning of mappings between forms and metaphorical meanings. Consciousness and Cognition 22(1). 174–183.
Lycan, William G.
2000Philosophy of language: A contemporary introduction. New York: Routledge.
Malt, Barbara C. & Asifa Majid
2013How thought is mapped into words. WIREs Cognitive Science 4(6). 583–597.
Marks, Lawrence E.
1996On perceptual metaphors. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11(1). 39–66.
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando
2007Nuevos avances en el estudio científico de la comprensión de textos. Universitas Psychologica 6(2). 331–343.
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando & Jazmin Cevasco
2014Text comprehension as a problem solving situation. Universitas Psychologica 13(2). 725–743.
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando, Juan C. Correa, Gopal Sakarkar, Giang Ngo, Susana Ruiz-Fernández, Natalie Butcher & Yuki Yamada
2017Placing joy, surprise and sadness in space: A cross-linguistic study. Psychological Research 81(4). 750–763.
Martin, Alex
2016GRAPES – Grounding representations in action, perception and emotion systems: How object properties and categories are represented in the human brain. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23(4). 979–990.
Mathôt, Sebastian, Jonathan Grainger & Kristof Strijkers
2017Pupillary responses to words that convey a sense of brightness or darkness. Psychological Science 28(8). 1116–1124.
McGlone, Matthew & Deanna Manfredi
2001Topic-vehicle interaction in metaphor comprehension. Memory & Cognition 291. 1209–1219.
Mehl, Matthias R., Charles R. Raison, Thaddeus W. Pace, Jesusa M. G. Arevalo & Steve W. Cole
2017Natural language indicators of differential gene regulation in the human immune system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(47). 12554–12559.
Mishra, Ramesh K. & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2010On the mental representations originating during the interaction between language and vision. Cognitive Processing 11(4). 295–305.
Münte, Thomas F., Kolja Schiltz & Marta Kutas
1998When temporal order belies conceptual order. Nature 3951. 71–73.
Nikolić, Danko
2009Is synaesthesia actually ideaesthesia? An inquiry into the nature of the phenomenon. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Synaesthesia, Science & Art, 26–29.
Ortony, Andrew
1979Metaphor, language, and thought. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poyatos, Fernando
1984The multichannel reality of discourse: Language-paralanguage-kinesics and the totality of communicative systems. Language Sciences 6(2). 307–337.
Prat, Chantel S., Robert A. Mason & Marcel A. Just
2012An fMRI investigation of analogical mapping in metaphor comprehension: The influence of context and individual cognitive capacities on processing demands. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 38(2). 282–294.
Raposo, Aan, Helen Moss, Emanuel A. Stamatakis & Loraine K. Tyler
2009Modulation of motor and premotor cortices by actions, action words, and action sentences. Neuropsychologia 47(2). 388–396.
Schmidt, Gwenda & Carol Seger
2009Neural correlates of metaphor processing: The roles of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty. Brain and Cognition 711. 375–386.
Sijtsma, Klaas
2015Playing with data – Or how to discourage questionable research practices and stimulate researchers to do things right. Psychometrika 81(1). 1–15.
Smith, Linda B. & Eliana Colunga
2012Developing categories and concepts. In Michael J. Spivey, Ken McRae & Marc F. Joanisse (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics, 283–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson
1995Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd edn. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Sperber, Dan & Deidre Wilson
2008A deflationary account of metaphors. In Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (ed.), Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 84–105. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tourangeau, Roger & Robert J. Sternberg
1981Aptness in metaphor. Cognitive Psychology 131. 27–55.
Tremblay, Pascale & Anthony S. Dick
2016Broca and Wernicke are dead, or moving past the classic model of language neurobiology. Brain and Language 1621. 60–71.
Velasco, Carlos, Alejandro Salgado-Montejo, Andrew J. Elliot, Andy T. Woods, Jorge Alvarado & Charles Spence
2016The shapes associated with approach/avoidance words. Motivation and Emotion 40(5). 689–702.
Vélez, Jorge I. & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2016Los secretos de Cien Años de Soledad: Una aproximación estilométrica para la investigación en Psicolingüística. Revista Colombiana de Psicología 25(2). 265–288.
Wilson, Deidre & Robyn Carston
2006Metaphor, relevance and the emergent property issue. Mind and Language 211. 404–433.
Wolff, Philip & Dedre Gentner
2000Evidence for role-neutral initial processing of metaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 261. 529–541.
Wolff, Philip & Dedre Gentner
2011Structure‐mapping in metaphor comprehension. Cognitive Science 35(8). 1456–1488.
Whitehead, Alfred N.
1978Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
Xue, Jin, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos & Xuna Pei
2015The linguistic context effects on the processing of body-object interaction words: An ERP study on second language learners. Brain Research 16131. 37–48.
Zeman, Adam, Michaela Dewar & Sergio Della Sala
2015Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia. Cortex 731. 378–380.
Zhong, Chen-Bo & Geoffrey J. Leonardelli
2008Cold and lonely: Does social exclusion literally feel cold?Psychological Science 19(9). 838–842.
Zhong, Chen-Bo & Katie Liljenquist
2006Wash away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science 313(5792). 1451–1452.
Cited by
Cited by 12 other publications
Hong, Bao, Lu Zhang & Hongri Sun
2019. Measurement of the Vertical Spatial Metaphor of Power Concepts Using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Khatin-Zadeh, Omid, Hassan Banaruee, Zahra Eskandari & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos
2019. Isomorphism: Abstract and Concrete Representations. Activitas Nervosa Superior 61:3 ► pp. 152 ff.
2024. Motor strength as a feature of concepts and visual representations. Frontiers in Psychology 15
Khatin‐Zadeh, Omid & Babak Yazdani‐Fazlabadi
2023. Two Mechanisms for Understanding Mathematical Concepts in Terms of Fictive Motions. Mind, Brain, and Education 17:2 ► pp. 86 ff.
Liu, Yiguang, Jun Yin & Junying Liang
2019. Why Smoggy Days Suppress Our Mood: Automatic Association Between Clarity and Valence. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando, Artin Arshamian, Carlos Tirado, Raydonal Ospina & Maria Larsson
2019. The Allocation of Valenced Percepts Onto 3D Space. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Oker, A.
2022. Embodied social cognition investigated with virtual agents: The infinite loop between social brain and virtual reality. Frontiers in Virtual Reality 3
Salas-Herrera, José Luis, Mabel Urrutia Martínez, Roberto Melipillan Araneda & Mónica Veliz De Vos
2021. Comprensión de oraciones de esfuerzo en jóvenes y adultos mayores desde una perspectiva corpórea. Universitas Psychologica 19 ► pp. 1 ff.
Siemens, George, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, Florence Gabriel, Kelsey Medeiros, Rebecca Marrone, Srecko Joksimovic & Maarten de Laat
2022. Human and artificial cognition. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence 3 ► pp. 100107 ff.
Wu, Xiangci, Huibin Jia & Enguo Wang
2023. The neurophysiological mechanism of valence-space congruency effect: evidence from spatial Stroop task and event-related EEG features. Cognitive Neurodynamics 17:4 ► pp. 855 ff.
Zhao, Tianyang, Yanli Huang, Donggui Chen, Lu Jiao, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, Ruiming Wang & Jiushu Xie
2020. The modality switching costs of Chinese–English bilinguals in the processing of L1 and L2. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73:3 ► pp. 396 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.