Situated Conceptualization Offers a Theoretical Account of Social Priming

The theory of situated conceptualization is introduced, including its core assumptions about the construction and storage of situated conceptualizations, the production of pattern completion inferences in relevant situations, and the implementation of these inferences via multimodal simulation. The broad applicability of the theory to many phenomena is reviewed, as is its ability to explain individual differences. The theory is then applied to social priming, showing that the theory provides a natural account of the diverse forms it takes. The theory also explains why social priming is difficult to define, why it often reflects modulating factors, and why it can be difficult to replicate. The importance of studying pattern completion inferences in the context of meaningful situated action receives emphasis. The Theory of Situated Conceptualization The construct of situated conceptualization developed originally to explain how simulations of conceptual knowledge become situated [1–5]. The construct was also used initially to explain social embodiment effects, a form of social priming [6]. Recently, situated conceptualization has been developed as a more general theoretical framework that underlies perception, action, cognition, social cognition, affective processing, and appetitive processing [7]. After presenting the three basic constructs of the theory—situated conceptualization, pattern completion inference, and multimodal simulation—it is applied to social priming. Situated conceptualization. A central premise of the situated conceptualization framework is that the brain is a situated processing architecture, designed to process situations in the moment and to simulate non-present situations in thought [1–7]. As a person perceives, cognizes, and acts in the current situation (e.g., a coffeehouse), multiple neural systems process different situational elements in parallel, generating complementary streams of information about the situation. Specifically, different neural systems process the current setting (parietal lobe, parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortex), objects in the setting (the ventral stream), other agents who are present (temporal poles, FFA, mPFC, PCC, STG, EBA), self conceptions and self relevance (mPFC, PCC), physical actions in the environment (motor and somatosensory cortices, cerebellum, basal ganglia), and a wide variety of mentalizing, affective, and interoceptive responses to the situation (mPFC, OFC, lPFC, ACC, insula, amygdala, PCC). Over time, each of these neural systems produces a continuous stream of perceptual experiences (qualia) for its respective situational content, along with corresponding conceptual interpretations. While in a