Colorful descriptions and loud movement: Does hippocampal damage impair the use of metaphor?

Pickett, C.*, Kurczek, J. & Duff, M.C. (2012, November). Colorful descriptions and loud movement: Does hippocampal damage impair the use of metaphor? Poster presentation at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students, San Jose, CA.

In contrast to traditional neuropsychological studies of metaphor, this study looks at the use of novel metaphor.

• This study also looks at metaphor production in a unique population. In doing so, we are broadening the network of cognitive and neural systems that contribute to metaphor in specific and language in general.

• All participants appear to be able to use figurative comparisons in near equivalent style. The number of episodes, expressions and tokens were very similar as well as figurative comparison type and resources used

• It appears that although amnesic participants in the matcher condition were part of a near equivalent number and style of figurative comparisons, they did not comprehend the comparisons as their card placement accuracy was far different from comparisons pairs

• Future directions will investigate the number of embedded expressions, the number of token repetitions and number of figurative themes used to get at the question of density.

• This study may prompt the further investigation of metaphor in these participants, as it appears that our understanding of “metaphor” is not as unitary as previously thought. The ability to use “metaphor” may be described by three abilities 1) the ability to make comparisons or see things as other things 2) use conventional metaphoric expressions and 3) generate, blend and juxtapose novel representations from distinct representation