Old proverbs in new skins - an FMRI study on defamiliarization

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics

Background:

• Processing fluency impacts reading comprehension and aesthetic appreciation.
• Defamiliarization, or making the familiar unfamiliar, is a rhetorical device used to engage readers.
• The neural underpinnings of affective and aesthetic responses to linguistic stimuli are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural correlates of processing different types of German proverbs and their variations.
• To examine the role of processing fluency and defamiliarization in affective and aesthetic experiences during reading.
• To differentiate the neural effects of content alteration versus wording changes in defamiliarization.

Main Methods:

• Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed.
• Participants processed five types of stimuli: familiar proverbs, unfamiliar proverbs, proverb-variants (altered content), proverb-substitutions (altered wording), and non-rhetorical sentences.
• Neural activation in brain regions associated with affect, aesthetics, attention, and error monitoring was analyzed.

Main Results:

• Defamiliarization effectively guides attention.
• Enhanced activation in affect-related regions (orbito-frontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex) occurred only when defamiliarization altered proverb content.
• Defamiliarization through wording changes was linked to attention and error monitoring processes.
• Familiar proverbs received the highest beauty ratings, despite proverb-variants showing some affect-related activation.

Conclusions:

• Defamiliarization is a potent attention-guiding mechanism in reading.
• The extent of affective engagement is contingent on the nature of defamiliarization, with content alteration eliciting stronger responses.
• While defamiliarization can engage affect-related brain areas, familiar proverbs are perceived as more aesthetically pleasing.