Inhibitory Mechanisms in the Processing of Negations: A Neural Reuse Hypothesis

Negation is known to have inhibitory consequences for the information under its scope. However, how it produces such effects remains poorly understood. Recently, it has been proposed that negation processing might be implemented at the neural level by the recruitment of inhibitory and cognitive control mechanisms. On this line, this manuscript offers the hypothesis that negation reuses general-domain mechanisms that subserve inhibition in other non-linguistic cognitive functions. The first two sections describe the inhibitory effects of negation on conceptual representations and its embodied effects, as well as the theoretical foundations for the reuse hypothesis. The next section describes the neurophysiological evidence that linguistic negation interacts with response inhibition, along with the suggestion that both functions share inhibitory mechanisms. Finally, the manuscript concludes that the functional relation between negation and inhibition observed at the mechanistic level could be easily integrated with predominant cognitive models of negation processing.