Imagers and mentalizers: capturing individual variation in metaphor interpretation via intersubject representational dissimilarity

When girls are pearls, do they have rare gracious attributes, or are they beautiful? It is well known that not only are metaphors open to different interpretations but also that these interpretations might vary across individuals, even with the same cultural context. However, the literature lacks a description of which patterns of interpretation emerge across individuals and which factors might drive them. Previous evidence suggests that interpreters differently recruit sensorimotor and sociocognitive strategies to interpret metaphors. Here, we tested the importance of metaphor multimodality to explain individual variability. We describe participants’ interpretations according to a series of psycholinguistic variables, including affective, cognitive, and sensory processes, that mirrors psychological states and hints at different cognitive mechanisms. With an innovative method that combines i) a multidimensional semi-automated linguistic analysis, ii) IS-RDM, which allows to uncover participant-level patterns of similarity, and iii) a data-driven clustering method, we were able to identify two groups of participants based on their verbal interpretations. Results showed that there are mentalizers, who explore the semantic networks and rely on sociocognitive information (e.g. they interpret Teachers are lanterns as They are able to make others understand whatever they want to) and imagers, who reenact sensory properties and rely on the activation of mental images (e.g. they interpret Teachers are lanterns as They are luminous). Our study showed that a data-driven approach can capture different metaphor interpretative profiles from the semantic features of the words used, suggesting that: i) participants focus on sensorimotor vs. sociocognitive features according to the different processing strategies they adopt and ii) the words they produce to interpret a metaphor are cues into these cognitive mechanisms. These data allow the reconciliation of the multiplicity of theories about metaphor comprehension, which might be due to the existence of differences across individuals. There seems to be multimodal alternative routes to solving metaphorical meaning, and acknowledging individual preferences allows to open windows on the modalities with which each individual conceptualizes the world.