Page "Cognitive development" Paragraph 25

Attaining a concept at the concrete level involves attending to something – an object, event, quality, or relation – discriminating it from other objects, events, qualities, or relations, forming a representation of it, and storing it in secondary memory.

Then, when the same object is experienced again, the stored representation is retrieved from secondary memory and used to test the incoming phenomenal representation as being the same or different.

The concrete level representation of the object is presumed to be constructed by the individual, rather than being an automatically produced literal copy, photograph, or template.