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Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 765–775 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Correctly identifying the meaning of a stimulus requires activating the appropriate semantic representation among many alternatives. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to differentiate semantic representations from each other, thereby expanding the semantic space. Here, in four experiments, we test this semantic-expansion hypothesis, finding that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit increasingly differentiated and separated semantic representations. This effect is mirrored at the neural level, where uncertainty aversion predicts greater distances between activity patterns in the left inferior frontal gyrus when reading words, and enhanced sensitivity to the semantic ambiguity of these words in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Two direct tests of the behavioural consequences of semantic expansion further reveal that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference and poorer generalization. Together, these findings show that the internal structure of our semantic representations acts as an organizing principle to make the world more identifiable.

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Fig. 1: Dissimilar semantic representations and neural activity patterns are more identifiable.
Fig. 2: The semantic-expansion at the psychological and neural level.
Fig. 3: People averse to uncertainty encode semantic ambiguity in the VMPFC.
Fig. 4: Semantic expansion improves discrimination but reduces generalization.

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Data availability

De-identified data for all experiments are publicly available at https://osf.io/gmqh4. The data used for analyses to estimate semantic similarity and ambiguity are available at https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/ and https://elexicon.wustl.edu/.

Code availability

Codes for the analyses of the paper are publicly available at https://osf.io/gmqh4.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by a Carney Innovation Grant from the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science and NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence Grant, no. P20GM103645 awarded to O.F.H. A.B. was supported by grant number R01MH125497 from the National Institute of Mental Health and grant number R21NS108380 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: O. Feldman Hall, A. Bhandari

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Marc-Lluís Vives, Daantje de Bruin, Oriel FeldmanHall & Apoorva Bhandari

  2. Department of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Marc-Lluís Vives

  3. Trimbos Institute, Netherlands Institute for Mental Health and Addiction, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Jeroen M. van Baar

  4. Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Oriel FeldmanHall

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Contributions

M.-L.V., D.d.B., O.F.H. & A.B. contributed to designing the research and writing the paper. J.M.v.B performed data collection. M.-L.V. and D.d.B. performed the data analyses.

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Correspondence to Marc-Lluís Vives, Oriel FeldmanHall or Apoorva Bhandari.

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Vives, ML., de Bruin, D., van Baar, J.M. et al. Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations. Nat Hum Behav 7, 765–775 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01561-5

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