Thompson-Schill, S. .
Over several decades, my group has attempted to understand the processes by which new conceptual knowledge is acquired and the neural changes that support concept acquisition. For most of these years, we have investigated the representation of physical features of object concepts, such as their colors or their shapes. Recently, we have turned to the question of how we learn and represent abstract information about concepts. I will describe several examples, still in their infancy, of this line of work. In one set of studies, we have explored the integration of visual and abstract object properties during learning. In another, we have asked whether we can learn abstract knowledge about object function from event structure. And in a third, we have examined the influences of the broader network architecture on the acquisition of conceptual knowledge. Central to all of these investigations is the goal of understanding cognitive and neural systems that support acquisition and representation of abstract properties of object concepts as well as the link between abstract properties and physical properties of object concepts, both of which are needed to form a complete representation of object concepts.