Contributions of Cognitive Factors in Conceptual Metaphors

The present study applied signal detection measures to test the hypothesis that activating abstract concepts with strong spatial metaphors (e. g., God is related to up and right, Devil is related to down and left) would orient spatial attention to compatible locations. In Experiment 1, participants performed a perceptual-discrimination task after judging the meaning of a word that varied in its religious meaning (God-related, Devil-related, or religiously neutral). Perceptual discrimination was better in the up-right quadrant when primed by God-related words. In contrast, enhanced perceptual discrimination was observed in the down-left quadrant when primed by Devil-related words. These metaphor-attention effects were abolished in Experiment 2, when only perceptual analyses of religious words were required in a font-type judgment task. Taken together, these findings support the attentional capture effect of conceptual metaphors and the necessity of semantic encoding of conceptual representations.