Concepts lie at the heart of our mental life, supporting a myriad of cognitive functions - including thinking and reasoning, object recognition, memory, and language comprehension and production. The nature of concepts and their representation in the mind and brain has been studied from many different perspectives and so provides valuable opportunities for integrative, interdisciplinary discussions. This special issue on conceptual representation contains invited papers from leading researchers across the range of cognitive science disciplines, addressing the nature of semantic and conceptual representation in the mind and brain. Contributions include both empirical reports and theoretical reviews, from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy and linguistics.