Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Metaphoric frames are prominently featured in public discourse. They highlight certain aspects of the target issuesthey are used to describe, thereby encouraging specific patterns of inference. Our goal was to test whether they would influencememory as well. Building off prior work, we contrasted two metaphors for crime: virus and beast. In a pilot study, we identifiedspecific causes, examples, and solutions to crime that were congruent with each frame (one but not the other; e.g., people thought“drug use” better exemplified a crime virus, whereas “murder” better exemplified a crime beast). Participants (n = 469) read orlistened to a short metaphorically-framed crime report, completed a filler task, and were prompted for the information they hadseen/heard. Results indicated the virus metaphor facilitated memory, overall, but not the specific frame-congruent information,suggesting a more general influence of the frame than predicted.