🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how visual experience shapes the organization and retrieval of semantic memory by comparing congenitally blind individuals with sighted controls in their representation of concrete and abstract concepts. Employing an attribute-generation task, the research introduces— for the first time in cross-sensory semantic memory studies—a semantic entropy metric derived from embedding-based models, complemented by generalized linear mixed-effects modeling for data analysis. Results reveal that sighted participants exhibit higher semantic entropy for abstract concepts, whereas blind individuals show elevated entropy specifically for visually salient concrete concepts (e.g., “penguin”), indicating that visual experience critically influences the dynamic navigation of semantic structure. This work provides novel methodological and empirical insights into the role of sensory experience in shaping semantic representations.
📝 Abstract
Embodied accounts of semantic memory highlight the role of sensorimotor systems in acquiring and storing knowledge. Congenitally blind populations offer a critical test bed for these assumptions, providing an opportunity to assess whether conceptual grounding requires visual experience. In this study, we assessed semantic memory navigation differences between blind and sighted individuals using a property listing task with concrete and abstract concepts. We computed semantic entropy, an embedding-based natural language processing metric that captures the predictability of retrieval. Generalized linear mixed models revealed distinct navigation patterns across groups: while sighted individuals showed higher entropy for abstract than concrete concepts, blind participants did not. Instead, blind individuals exhibited higher entropy for visually salient concrete concepts (e.g., penguin). These results underscore the role of visual experience in the organization and dynamic navigation of semantic memory.