Summary: Researchers investigated how cultural and linguistic backgrounds shape the neural organization of abstract thought. They report that speakers of different languages who grew up in different cultures form many abstract concepts in the same brain systems, while some concept-specific differences reflect cultural and linguistic nuance.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined where concrete and abstract concepts arise in the brain and whether those neural patterns are consistent across people who grew up in different cultures and speak different languages.
“We wanted to compare languages to see whether cultural background changes how people understand and mentally represent abstract ideas like justice,” said Roberto Vargas, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and lead author of the study.
Vargas continued foundational research in neural and semantic organization begun by Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology. For more than three decades, Just’s group has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map which brain regions activate for concrete objects and, more recently, for abstract scientific concepts such as force and gravity.
The new study extended that approach to test whether abstract concepts are represented in the same neural regions across native speakers of two very different languages: English and Mandarin. The team used multivariate pattern analysis to compare neural signatures of 28 abstract concepts spanning seven categories: social, emotion, metaphysics, law, religiosity, mathematics and scientific concepts.
Participants—20 total, evenly split between native English and native Mandarin speakers—lay in an fMRI scanner while they considered single abstract prompts. Each trial presented a single concept, such as “sacrilege” from the religiosity category, for three seconds. Between prompts, participants cleared their minds by focusing on a shrinking blue ellipse for seven seconds. Each run of 28 concepts was repeated six times to produce multiple datasets for statistical modeling and cross-language comparison.
Analyses revealed a common neural infrastructure for representing abstract information across both languages. Factor analysis of activation patterns identified four neurosemantic dimensions that consistently organized the 28 concepts: the degree to which a concept is verbally represented, whether it is internal to the person, the amount of social content it carries, and whether it is rule-based. These dimensions served as shared neurocognitive resources embedded within a broader semantic network used for abstract thought.
Using these shared semantic dimensions, the researchers could reliably identify individual abstract concepts in one language from the neural signature in the other language with an average rank accuracy of 0.65 (p < .001). In other words, despite cultural and linguistic differences, many abstract concepts map onto the same brain systems. At the same time, some concept-specific differences emerged: variations in the salience of particular semantic dimensions accounted for language-specific meanings of certain abstract terms.
“Cultures and languages can give us different perspectives on the world, but our mental filing cabinets are strikingly similar,” Just said. “All brains organize abstract concepts using the same core brain systems, even though individual and cultural experience can influence how strongly particular dimensions are engaged.”
Vargas emphasizes that brain systems function like shared cognitive hardware: people with similar experiences activate similar networks. “We evolved with comparable brains that perform specific functions. If your life involves frequent social interaction, the regions that process social information will be more active and more richly connected,” he explained.
The researchers noted patterns in specific concept categories. Math- and science-related concepts showed high cross-language similarity, likely reflecting the shared symbolic and procedural nature of these domains. Emotion and social concepts also showed cross-language overlap, consistent with common social circumstances and interpersonal relationships that underlie those categories.
At the same time, Vargas and Just caution against overgeneralizing from this study because it used a modest sample—20 participants—and compared only two languages. The results establish a framework for identifying both the shared neural architecture of abstract thought and the language- or culture-specific variations that modulate individual concept representations.
Vargas plans to expand this line of research in two directions. One project will examine how social identity influences decisions about reward and punishment. The other will study how people from different racial and social groups mentally represent societal institutions—such as police and healthcare—and how those representations vary across communities.
“Now that we have a clearer sense of which aspects of abstract concepts are generalizable across individuals, we can begin exploring how those concepts operate within social and cultural contexts,” Vargas said.
About this neuroscience research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Carnegie Mellon University
Contact: Press Office – Carnegie Mellon University
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access. “Similarities and differences in the neural representations of abstract concepts across English and Mandarin” by Roberto Vargas et al., published in Human Brain Mapping.
Abstract
Similarities and differences in the neural representations of abstract concepts across English and Mandarin
Recent research suggests a shared neural organization for representing abstract concepts among English speakers. This study used multivariate pattern analysis on fMRI data to compare neural representations of 28 abstract concepts between native English and native Mandarin speakers.
Factor analysis of activation patterns across both language groups revealed four core neurosemantic dimensions—verbal representation, internality to the person, social content, and rule-based structure—that reliably organized these concepts. These shared dimensions provided enough information to identify individual abstract concepts in one language from neural patterns recorded in the other language, supporting a common neural basis for abstract thought across linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Although the same neurosemantic dimensions operate across languages, differential emphasis on particular dimensions explains language-specific differences in meaning for some concepts. These dimensions function as neurocognitive resources within a larger network responsible for general semantic processing, offering a framework to study both universal and culturally specific aspects of abstract concept representation in the brain.