Although a large proportion of the lexicon consists of abstract concepts, little is known about how they are represented by the brain. Here, we investigated how the mind represents relations shared between sets of mental representations that are superficially unrelated, such as car–engine and dog–tongue, but that nonetheless share a more general, abstract relation, such as whole–part. Participants saw a pair of words on each trial and were asked to indicate whether they could think of a relation between them. Importantly, they were not explicitly asked whether different word pairs shared the same relation, as in analogical reasoning tasks. We observed representational similarity for abstract relations in regions in the “conceptual hub” network, even when controlling for semantic relatedness between word pairs. By contrast, we did not observe representational similarity in regions previously implicated in explicit analogical reasoning. A given relation was sometimes repeated across sequential word pairs, allowing us to test for behavioral and neural priming of abstract relations. Indeed, we observed faster RTs and greater representational similarity for primed than unprimed trials, suggesting that mental representations of abstract relations are transiently activated on this incidental analogy task. Finally, we found a significant correlation between behavioral and neural priming across participants. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate relational priming using functional neuroimaging and to show that neural representations are strengthened by relational priming. This research shows how abstract concepts can be brought to mind momentarily, even when not required for task performance.

尽管大部分词典由抽象概念组成，但人们对大脑如何表示它们知之甚少。在这里，我们研究了思维如何表示表面上不相关的心理表征集之间共享的关系，例如汽车发动机和狗舌，但它们仍然共享更普遍、抽象的关系，例如整体-部分。参与者在每次试验中看到一对词，并被要求指出他们是否能想到它们之间的关系。重要的是，他们没有被明确询问不同的词对是否具有相同的关系，就像在类比推理任务中一样。我们观察到“概念中心”网络中区域抽象关系的表征相似性，即使在控制词对之间的语义相关性时也是如此。相比之下，我们没有观察到先前与显式类比推理有关的区域的表征相似性。给定的关系有时会在连续的词对中重复，使我们能够测试抽象关系的行为和神经启动。事实上，我们观察到与未启动试验相比，启动试验更快的 RT 和更大的表征相似性，表明抽象关系的心理表征在这个偶然的类比任务中被瞬时激活。最后，我们发现参与者的行为和神经启动之间存在显着相关性。据我们所知，这是第一项使用功能神经成像研究关系启动的研究，并表明神经表征通过关系启动得到加强。这项研究显示了抽象概念是如何瞬间浮现在脑海中的，