Aphantasia and language: the role of mental simulation and linguistic associations in semantic processing.
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2023-01-30
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en
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This study investigated the role of mental simulation and word association strength in the semantic processing of aphantasics, people with no visual imagery, and controls by comparing their verification times and accuracy scores in a property verification task. The property relatedness of the false pairs was found to influence the results, with unrelated false pairs facilitating responses. A linguistic association measure better explained the performances in this unrelated condition than in the related condition, suggesting that word association strength was used. Contrary, perceptual measures like property size better explained the performances in the related condition than the unrelated one, suggesting mental simulation was used when deeper semantic processing was required. No difference was found in performance between the groups, but the perceptual measures did explain the controls’ performances more strongly than the aphantasics’ performances when the false pairs were related, suggesting that aphantasics rely less on mental simulation than controls.
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