Many scientists describe themselves metaphorically as a “gardener” or “sculptor” of the undergraduate students in their lab and the students’ own research ideas. Across two preregistered studies (N = 1200), we applied existing methods for mapping the entailments of metaphorical concepts to provide insight into lay conceptions of undergraduate research mentoring. Participants were presented with one of several mentoring metaphors and rated how closely a series of mentor attributes fit the metaphor. Iterated exploratory factor analysis revealed a small set of dimensions along which the metaphors differed systematically, reflecting the mentor’s role as a nurturer, authority figure, communicator, and collaborator. The metaphors were also associated with different intuitions about mentors’ responsibility for and power to influence student learning in the lab. Our findings show that mentoring metaphors capture distinct mentor attribute profiles, with implications for how scientists understand and communicate the value of their mentoring approach to their students.

Some people say they routinely think in an “inner voice,” while others assume this phrase is just a figure of speech. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 190), we investigated whether such subjective differences in internal verbalization predict attested effects of language on perceptual discrimination. Participants completed a canonical discrimination task assessing language-driven categorical perception of facial expressions, plus a self-report measure of internal verbalization and other modes of mental representation. The results replicated the behavioral signatures of categorical perception—faster and more accurate responses for cross-category than within-category discriminations. However, the strength of these effects was unrelated to participants’ propensity for internal verbalization. Our findings suggest that subjective experiences of inner voice use are not a reliable indicator of linguistic involvement in perceptual discrimination. These findings add to an emerging body of research showing that even large differences in mental experiences often lack clear behavioral consequences.