Building on the importance of sociality in grounding abstract concepts, this study investigated how concept type shapes recognition memory for social stimuli. Participants engaged in text-based dialogues about abstract or concrete concepts with virtual agents, after which recognition of names and faces, as well as perceived closeness, was measured. The procedure included a preliminary, context-based validation of linguistic di...

A vast body of evidence has shown that concrete concepts are processed faster and more accurately than abstract concepts in a variety of cognitive tasks. This phenomenon is widely known as the concreteness effect, and explanations for its occurrence seem to reflect differences in processing and organization for both types of representations. While there is considerable evidence to support this concreteness effect, the nature o...