The DOI matches its Crossref record; 108 of the 108 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Situated Nature of Concepts
Abstract
For decades the importance of background situations has been documented across all areas of cognition. Nevertheless, theories of concepts generally ignore background situations, focusing largely on bottom-up, stimulus-based processing. Furthermore, empirical research on concepts typically ignores background situations, not incorporating them into experimental designs. A selective review of relevant literatures demonstrates that concepts are not abstracted out of situations but instead are situated. Background situations constrain conceptual processing in many tasks (e.g., recall, recognition, categorization, lexical decision, color naming, property verification, property generation) across many areas of cognition (e.g., episodic memory, conceptual processing, visual object recognition, language comprehension). A taxonomy of situations is proposed in which grain size, meaningfulness, and tangibility distinguish the cumulative situations that structure cognition hierarchically.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
(1966) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 10,293
Barsalou, L. W. (1999) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x99002149 · Cited by 6,887
Self-citation(1995) · Cited by 6,864
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory
(2010) · Psychology of Learning and Motivation · doi:10.1016/c2009-0-62209-1 · Cited by 5,994
Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories
Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(75)90024-9 · Cited by 5,933
Basic objects in natural categories
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(76)90013-x · Cited by 5,643
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication
Kantowitz, B., & Suchman, L. A. (1990) · The American Journal of Psychology · doi:10.2307/1423221 · Cited by 5,299
Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices*
Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. (1981) · Cognitive Science · doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0502_2 · Cited by 5,248
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983) · Cited by 5,190
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.88.5.375 · Cited by 4,889
Cited by
Barsalou, L. W. (2008) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639 · Cited by 5,936
Self-citationSimulation, situated conceptualization, and prediction
Barsalou, L. W. (2009) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0319 · Cited by 1,017
Self-citationLanguage and simulation in conceptual processing
Barsalou, L. W., Santos, A., Simmons, W. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2008) · Symbols and EmbodimentDebates on meaning and cognition · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217274.003.0013 · Cited by 696
Self-citationWhat is so special about embodied simulation?
Gallese, V., & Sinigaglia, C. (2011) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.09.003 · Cited by 684
Attitude construction: evaluation in context
Schwarz, N. (2007) · Social Cognition · doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.5.638 · Cited by 627
Metadata
- Authors
- Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W.
- Venue
- The American Journal of Psychology
- Publisher
- University of Illinois Press
- Published
- 2006-10-01
- Volume
- 119
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 349-384
- ISSN
- 0002-9556 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-8298
- OpenAlex
- W2066727856
- Cited by
- 276
- References
- 108
- FWCI
- 13.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Situated Nature of Concepts. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/20445349
- The paper
- Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2006). The Situated Nature of Concepts. The American Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.2307/20445349
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
