Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Concepts are the basis of the human cognitive system, andthe question of what constitutes the content of these mentalrepresentations has long occupied the cognitive sciences.Work in psychology, linguistics and cognitive neurosciencehas converged on the idea that we develop our conceptualrepresentations through our perception of and interactionwith our environment. To date, such research has typicallyrestricted consideration to the perceptual modalities ofvision, touch, sound, taste, and smell. However, there isanother major modality of perceptual information that isdistinct from these traditional five senses; that is,interoception, or sensations within the body. In this paper,we explore the role of interoception in the perceptualgrounding of concepts.Recently, modality-specific measures of the strength ofperceptual experience (Lynott & Connell 2009, 2013) haveproven themselves important predictors of human behaviourin a range of conceptual tasks including word recognitionand reading (Connell & Lynott, 2010, 2012, 2014a, 2014b,2015, 2016). In a megastudy of over 32,000 words fromacross the abstract-concrete spectrum, we asked people toprovide modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength forsix modalities: the usual five (auditory, haptic, gustatory,olfactory, visual) plus the new category of interoceptivestrength. We found that interoceptive information dominatesthe perceptual profile of a sizeable number of concepts (9%;e.g., hangover, eternal, remorse), less than the proportion ofconcepts dominated by vision (74%; e.g., book) or sound(12%; e.g., melody), but more than are dominated by touch(3%; e.g., silky), gustation (2%; e.g., candy), or olfaction(<1%; e.g., bleach). Using principal components analysis toexamine how interoception relates to the other perceptualmodalities, we found that it tends to be strongly loadedagainst visual and haptic strength (i.e., that which is sensedwithin the body can be neither seen nor touched) but isrelatively distinct from sound, taste, and smell.Finally, we tested whether interoceptive strength offersvaluable information to conceptual content by examining itsrole in semantic facilitation of word recognition. Maximumperceptual strength (i.e., strength in the dominant modality)has previously been shown to predict word recognitionperformance better than concreteness or imageability(Connell & Lynott, 2012). We therefore compared thepredictive ability of two different versions of maximumperceptual strength: the original measure based on fivetraditional modalities, and a new version based on sixmodalities including interoceptive strength. In a regressionanalysis of lexical decision and word naming performance,interoceptive information considerably improved theefficacy of maximum perceptual strength in predicting bothresponse time and accuracy (Bayes Factors ranged fromBF 10 = 3.303×10 7 to BF 10 = 3.059×10 16 ). That is,perceptually strong words were recognized more quicklyand accurately than perceptually weak words, andinteroceptive strength was a valuable component in thisperceptual facilitation. Overall, these findings suggest thatinteroception has comparable status to other modalities incontributing to the perceptual grounding of concepts.