Sentence "triples" to assess cognitive impact of metaphors (IMAGE)
Caption
Eyes widen in response to interest and engagement. Then-senior Serena Mon, working with a team of psychology researchers at Princeton, discovered that pupils consistently dilate more in response to metaphors than to literal or concrete statements, demonstrating that even everyday metaphors — sometimes called clichés — engage our brains more than plain language. The researchers compared pupil reactions to common metaphors like “out of my hands” to both a literal paraphrase like “out of my control” and a concrete description using the same key words, as seen here in example 2. They created a database of 180 these exhaustively normed “sentence triples” — 60 metaphors, 60 literal translations and 60 concrete phrases — that they have made available to other researchers.
Credit
Courtesy of the authors: Serena Mon, Mira Nencheva, Francesca Citron, Casey Lew-Williams and Adele Goldberg
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