The hybrid nature of ecological concepts: evidence from multiple methodologies

Climate change represents one of the greatest challenges of the modern era. Due to the increasing suffering of the Planet and living beings for environmental transformations that are, in most cases, generated by human conduct, a broad body of research has worked to identify factors leading to pro-environmental behaviors. Strikingly, several aspects were deepened, except cognitive representations of ecological events. Thus, my research contributions aimed to fill this gap, investigating for the first time the conceptualization of ecology in light of studies on abstract and concrete concepts and also comparing different age groups. Across four experiments, I examined the semantic organization, representation, and processing of ecological concepts by relying on multiple data (ratings, word associations, reaction times, Event-Related Potentials) collected through both behavioral (rating task, semantic fluency tasks, Go/No-Go task, feature verification task) and neuro (EEG) methodologies. All my works tested the hypothesis that ecological concepts might constitute a hybrid conceptual domain, showing properties of abstract and concrete concepts, and that their conceptualization might vary across generations. Overall, results depicted ecological concepts as more similar to abstract concepts (mainly in semantic organization and conceptual representation, as expressed by feature retrieval) or more abstractly characterized than them (mainly in semantic organization and conceptual processing). We found minimal age differences, with older adults slightly differing in the knowledge related to ecology and showing a richer, more complex, and less abstract characterization of the domain than their younger counterparts. Findings are relevant from different perspectives. On a theoretical side, the malleable and multifarious nature of ecological concepts challenges the traditional concrete-abstract dichotomy, highlighting the flexible character of abstractness; on a societal side, our results might inform awareness policies and interventions on climate change; on a scientific side, they might help raise research on this increasingly urgent topic by equipping the scientific community with two free available databases (TECo and O-TECo) containing semantic norms for ecological concepts tailored to both general population and older adults.