The Ups and Downs of Black and White: Do Sensorimotor Metaphors Reflect an Evolved Perceptual Interface?

ABSTRACT

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used to measure population levels of conceptual alignment among two polar sensory metaphors and clusters of concepts to which they are commonly applied. A total of 873 participants were tested online, to compare within- and between-cluster alignments of concepts associated with two different polar sensory metaphors (up/down and black/white). IAT results were sensitive to semantic alignments that were also picked up by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) using a large-scale corpus of English. However, even with these semantic alignments taken into account, the dual categorization results demonstrated strong metaphor-cluster alignments over and above the predictions of LSA. It is proposed that, rather than ontogenetic development of metaphoric concepts based on sensorimotor experience, conventionalized sensorimotor metaphors in language may be cognitive tools that provide language learners with insights supported by conceptual properties of a phylogenetically evolved perceptual interface.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Faculty Research grant to FHD from Swarthmore College and by a Michener Sabbatical Award to FHD. The experiment reported here was conducted as part of the senior honors thesis of TOZ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

Tina O. Zhu and Frank H. Durgin conceptualized and designed the experiments (including the experiments described in the supplementary materials) and did preliminary analyses of the data. Tina O. Zhu wrote an initial report of the data as an undergraduate honors thesis. Frank H. Durgin, Peiyao Chen and Tina O. Zhu finalized analyses of the data, and wrote and edited the current manuscript.

Availability of data and materials

Complete data, on the Open Science Framework (OSF) site are available on OSF at the following address: https://osf.io/exs5u/?view_only=0f57f7ea85f5406eba71d1608e7498c6

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2024.2309977