In recent years, several scientific disciplines – linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, neurophysiology, medicine, philosophy, education – have paid considerable attention to studying the concreteness/abstractness concept. Exist-ing reviews on this topic cover only one area of research. This article provides an interdisciplinary overview from a general cognitive perspective. It is brief by ne-cessity, but covers the main results obtained (concreteness effect, neurophysio-logical correlates of concreteness/abstractness, dictionaries with concreteness ratings) and gives a general integral idea of this area. The main theories explain-ing the effect of concreteness – the dual-coding theory and the context-availabil-ity theory – are considered.