The ability to conceptualize objects, events, and states is central to human cognition. When people plan and make decisions, they conceptualize future events; when people recall a previous experience, they conceptualize past events; when people understand language, they conceptualize the meaning of a speaker's utterance. Theories of knowledge often assume that when people conceptualize something, they conceptualization it an isolated abstract manner. Thus, when people conceptualize a chair, they conceptualize it as an isolated and abstract object; or when people conceptualize a purchase, they conceptualize it as an unsituated abstract event. The proposed research aims instead to demonstrate that conceptualizations are situated, first, in a physical environment, and second, with respect to the perceiver's cognitive perspective. Thus, when people conceptualize a chair, they situate it in a particular setting (e.g., a kitchen), and they adopt a cognitive perspective toward it (e.g., standing on it to change a light bulb). Besides including settings and cognitive perspectives, situated conceptualizations represent focal entities in a context-appropriate manner. When people conceptualize a chair in a specific situation, they don't represent the chair abstractly, instead they represent a specific type of chair appropriate for that situation (e.g., a kitchen chair in a kitchen). Three lines of research examine whether conceptualizations are situated. The first uses the property generation and property verification tasks to establish situational content in conceptualizations. The second uses the false memory task to demonstrate that learned material is typically situated, and that the situations inferred at encoding later produce reconstructive memory errors at retrieval. The third assesses the hypothesis that abstract concepts, such as truth and freedom, depend critically on their meanings for situationswithout situations these concepts are difficult to understand. This research is highly relevant to applications in education and training. Should it demonstrate that conceptualizations are situated, it would motivate instructional methods that situate learned material. Rather than trying to instill abstract non-situated concepts in students and trainees, instilling situated conceptualizations may prove much more effective. The proposed research has much potential for supporting and informing these efforts.
