Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We argue that the key question in conceptual storage is best viewed not as a question of instances versus generalisations, but rather one of unitary versus multiple representation accounts of conceptual storage. On previous evidence, it has been difficult to determine whether a particular result stems from stored information regarding the concept or from the processes that operate in invoking a particular concept (Komatsu, 1992). In this paper, we attempt to shed some light on the nature of stored conceptual structure using the different influences that surface and stmctural features have been shown to have on the recall of a particular representation (Centner, Ratterman and Forbus, 1993). We conclude that at least some concepts may not be stored using a unitary representation.