When we’re told ‘This coffee is hot’ upon being served a familiar caffeinated beverage at our local diner or cafe, the message is clear. But what about when we’re told ‘This coffee is not hot’? Does that mean we think it’s cold? Or room temperature? Or just warm? A team of scientists has now identified how our brains work to process phrases that include negation (i.e., ‘not’), revealing that it mitigates rather than inverts meaning — in other words, in our minds, negation merely reduces the temperature of our coffee and does not make it ‘cold.’
When we’re told “This coffee is hot” upon being served a familWhen we’re told “This coffee is not hot” it is not clear whether it means it is cold, room temperature, or just warm. However, a team of scientists has identified how our brains process phrases that include negation, such as “not”. They found that negation only reduces the temperature of our coffee in our minds, rather than completely inverting the meaning to make it “cold”. This gives us a better understanding of how negation operates in making sense of phrases.Zuanazzi, who was a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s Department of Psychology at the time of the study and the lead author of the paper published in the journal PLOS Biology, explains that negation serves as a mitigator of adjectives such as ’bad’ or ‘good,’ ‘sad’ or ‘happy,’ and ’cold’ or ‘hot.’ This discovery helps us to better understand how the brain interprets subtle changes in meaning. Negation is commonly used in various forms of communication, from advertising to legal documents, to intentionally obscure the true meaning of a phrase. This sheds light on the complexity of language and cognition.paraphrase this text:
AI tools struggle to understand sentences that contain negation, according to researchers. The results of their study demonstrate how humans comprehend such phrases and also offer potential insights into improving AI capabilities. Human language has been recognized for its ability to create new and intricate meanings by combining words, but the process behind this has not been fully understood. In an effort to investigate this, Zuanazzi and her team conducted a series of experiments to assess how participants interpreted phrases, and also observed brain activity during these tasks. This was done to gain a more precise understanding of how the human brain processes language.The researchers found that participants were able to accurately gauge neurological function. During the experiments, participants were asked to rate the meaning of adjective phrases with and without negation on a scale from 1 to 10 using a mouse cursor. This scale was used to determine if participants interpreted phrases with negation as the opposite of those without negation or as something more measured.The study found that it took participants longer to understand phrases containing negation compared to phrases without negation, showing that negation slows down our processing of meaning due to its greater complexity. The researchers also observed that when participants moved their cursors, negated phrases were initially interpreted as affirmative before shifting to a more nuanced meaning, indicating that “not hot” is not interpreted as either “hot” or “cold,” but rather as something in between. Additionally, the scientists utilized magnetoencephalography to further analyze brain activity during this process.The researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the magnetic fields produced by participants’ brain activity while they completed the word interpretation tasks. Similar to the behavioral experiments, the brain’s response to words like “cold” and “hot” was altered by negation, indicating that “not hot” is interpreted as “less hot” and “not cold” is interpreted as “less cold,” making them less distinct. In conclusion, the neural data aligned with the findings from the behavioral experiments: negation does not completely reverse the meaning of “hot” to “cold,” but rather diminishes or softens it.The study explores the range of meaning between “cold” and “hot.” Zuanazzi, now at the Child Mind Institute, notes that language comprehension is a complex cognitive process that goes beyond the simple meanings of individual words. The paper’s co-authors include Pablo Ripollés, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and associate director of Music and Audio Research Laboratory at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; Jean-Rémi King, a researcher at France’s École Normale Supérieure; and Wy Ming Lin.The study involved a doctoral student from the University of Tübingen, Laura Gwilliams, who was a doctoral student at NYU at the time of the research, and David Poeppel, a professor at NYU and managing director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany.
Funding for the research was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation .
