Theory and connectionist model relating to the manner in which concepts are represented in semantic memory and processed according to the interaction between two statistical properties of their semantic features : the distinctiveness (the degree to which a feature is shared with other concepts or with which it can distinguish a concept of another) and the correlation (degree of co-occurrence of features). According to this view, living things would have a large number of shared features which are highly correlated. Inanimate objects have few semantic features but more distinctive.