Zhu (2017) used the implicit association test (IAT) to assess metaphorical alignment between concepts such as black andwhite and good and evil. Here we asked whether self-identified Black people have similar metaphoric alignments as thosewho identify as White. In an initial experiment, we tested pairwise metaphoric associations between black and white, dirtyand clean, and good and evil. Measured strength of the 3 alignment pairings for these 3 sets of concepts was statistically thesame among Black participants as that measured by Zhu for white participants. In a follow-up experiment, we comparedself-identified Black and White participants IAT-scores for race (i.e., faces) and for color (i.e., chess pieces) IATs. ForWhite participants, mean strength of white-positive alignment was identical for race and color; Black participants showedonly slight white-positive bias for race IATs, and an intermediate level of white-positive bias for color IATs.

Recent emphases on differences between metaphors andsimiles pose a quandary. The two forms clearly differ instrength, but often seem to require similar interpretations. InExperiment 1 we show that ratings of comprehensibility arehighly correlated across simile and metaphor sentencesdiffering only in the presence or absence of “like”. InExperiment 2 we show that comprehensibility ratings forfigurative forms predict both early (first pass) and late(second pass) fixation durations for metaphor vehicle, butonly late fixation durations for vehicles in similes. Similevehicles appear to initially be processed similarly to literalcomparisons, with figurative interpretation occurring later.These observations are consistent with the different pragmaticstrengths, and similar interpretations of the two forms.

In the classic horizontal vertical illusion (HVI), vertical lines appear 5-6% longer than horizontal lines. However, in outdoor scenes vertical poles of several meters appear as much as 25% longer than frontal ground extents. This large-scale HVI is consistent with angular scale expansion theory (Durgin & Li, 2011). It is known that the classic HVI is yoked to the reference frame of the eye itself, such that the illusion reverses when the observer is on his or her side. In a series of experiments conducted both in real outdoor spaces and in immersive virtual environments we examined how the large-scale HVI was affected by reorienting the observer, and found that the large scale HVI was reduced, but not reversed. The amount of reduction was quantitatively consistent with a retinotopic contribution of the classical HVI (6%). Most of the large-scale HVI is world-centric.

Across many cultures, similar sensory metaphors are used for similar kinds of personality traits, including words likesweet and bitter, straight and crooked, warm and cold (Asch, 1958). Although such metaphors seem to make sense,our post hoc intuitions may be tainted by confirmation bias. We measured the strength of alignments between each ofa set of nine sensory pairs (e.g., warm/cold) pictured literally, and a set of eight pairs of literal personality concepts(e.g., friendly/aloof) using dual categorization tasks (IATs), and then extracted principal components from these patternsof alignment between sensory and personality concepts across 72 different pairings. The resulting 2D metaphor spaceseemed to reflect something akin to the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002), with axes representing both warmth(PC1: warm/soft) and competence (PC2: bright/high). When we repeated the experiment, with new images and labels,essentially the same structure captured these nine sensory metaphor pairs.

What makes some metaphors easier to understand than oth-ers? Theoretical accounts of metaphor processing appeal todimensions like conventionality and aptness to explain vari-ability in metaphor comprehensibility. In a typical experiment,one group of naive participants rates a set of metaphoric sen-tences along these dimensions, while another is timed readingthe same sentences. Then, the ratings are used to predict re-sponse times in order to identify the most relevant linguistic di-mension for metaphor comprehension. However, surprisinglyhigh correlations between ratings of theoretically orthogonalconstructs and the results of an experiment in which a con-text manipulation affected ratings of metaphor conventionalityand aptness suggest that these measures should be treated asdependent, rather than explanatory, variables. We discuss theimplications of this perspective for theories of language pro-cessing.