Pupils Reveal Strong Engagement with Metaphor

Article: In new cognitive research, people’s eyes reveal that clichés are underrated
Source: Princeton University
Published: October 20, 2021 

In metaphor-literal phrase pairs, participants considered metaphors
to convey more emotions and richer meaning, but not more information

Eyes are the windows to the soul, capturing and relaying information about our inner thoughts and emotions. This subtle expression of engagement can nonetheless be seen through tell-tale reactions of our pupils. As an offshoot of previous work wherein functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the amydala, considered the emotional center of our brains, was found to respond more to metaphors than to literal language, a group of scientists sought to further explore our response to metaphors through pupillometry. The latter method also allows for "tighter time controls," as pupils respond in a fraction of a second. Then undergraduate student and first author of the study explains, “We saw over and over again that when our subjects reached the metaphorical part of the sentence, that split second was when the pupils dilated.” Furthermore, the pupils remained dilated for a couple of seconds, suggesting heightened engagement. In the present study, the researchers wanted to tease apart the relationship beyond merely the difference between a common metaphor ("grasping an idea") and a literal paraphrase ("understanding an idea"), so they added a third category representing a concrete description ("grasp a rail"), which uses the same key words in a purely literal way. They then created a database of 180 sentences/phrases, 60 in each category, and placed them through a rigorous norming process for familiarity, complexity, intensity, plausibility and positivity. The database is made publicly available for other researchers. Survey data from the norming process indicated that when metaphorical and literal sentences were compared directly, participants judged metaphorical sentences to be significantly more emotional and convey richer meaning, but were not considered more informative. They report that initial intentions to disentangle the emotional and the cognitive aspects of response to metaphor have proven difficult. Senior author of the study comments that, similar to amygdala response, “Pupils likewise dilate in response to both emotional engagement or cognitive engagement. In fact, we’re hard pressed to come up with a dependent measure that doesn’t react to both.” They nonetheless conclude that conventional metaphors are more engaging than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences, which we should not shy away from.

My rating of this study: ⭐⭐

Mona SK, Nenchevaa M, Citron FMM, et al. "Conventional metaphors elicit greater real-time engagement than literal paraphrases or concrete sentences." Journal of Memory and Language.  121:104285. December 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2021.104285