You've nailed the idea. These are culturally conditioned actions, and therefore learned interpretations. The act of calling something the name "Ferris Wheel" is part of a larger group of mental activities we group together as "identification”. We generally tend to abstract all those actions as a simple action of applying a concept (Ferris wheel) to an instance (the sight). This, however, is an invented simplification which our introspection makes up for us. It’s kind of like looking at a bunch of people doing a variety of actions and just saying “it’s a party”. Yes, but that hides a lot.

The key is that every act of identification, which is commonly considered a single event, is actually a large number of re-interpretations of raw experiences into a variety of useful concrete thoughts. The goal of this series will be to actually go into what motivates each instance of learning such a re-interpretation. And by the same token we can even explain why our introspection seems to re-interpret our re-interpretations as a single unified concept.

As for whether the word or image comes first that’s unique to the individual. For example, you can read about Ferris wheels in books for years until you finally see one, in which case it is the word. Or you can live in a carnival and go on rides before you really learn how to speak, in which case it is probably the image. But even the “image” might be an oversimplification.

At the risk of running on about what “image” means I’ll stop here. Thanks a lot for your feedback though.