What is a concept?

Abstract

Concepts are the tools we use to understand and interact with the world around us. It is not only useful for communication; concepts are present in most (if not all) cognitive tasks we realize. When we enter a new restaurant, encounter a new animal or meet a new person we automatically start to process information received in the attempt to match them with categories we already have. From an evolutionary point of view, this is really important because if the new object is similar enough with a class we already know, it means that we know how to deal with it (or what to expect from it). However, there is much we still don't know about how concepts represent classes and the different features and functions they display in different domains of knowledge. This is an attempt to investigate the nature of representation and cognition.