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Individual differences in mentalizing skills and their relationship to concept processing
Hannah T Corenblum1, Penny M Pexman1
1Western University, 1151 Richmond St, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada.
Acta Psychologica
|February 6, 2026
Summary
Mental state inferencing, the ability to understand mental states, may be a key mechanism for how we process word meanings. Stronger mentalizing skills correlate with a greater "cognition effect" in semantic processing.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Lexical semantics theories propose meaning retrieval via simulation.
- Simulation mechanisms in semantic processing remain unclear.
- Mental state inferencing is a proposed simulation mechanism for cognitive concepts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if mental state inferencing acts as a simulation mechanism for word meaning.
- To examine the relationship between individual differences in mentalizing skills and semantic processing.
- To test the "cognition effect" in syntactic classification tasks.
Main Methods:
- A pre-registered study with 297 adult participants.
- Assessed mentalizing skills using three distinct measures.
- Employed two syntactic classification tasks (verb/noun) to evaluate semantic processing.
- Measured reaction times and accuracy to identify the cognition effect.
Main Results:
- The cognition effect was replicated: high-cognition words were processed faster and more accurately.
- Significant interactions were found between mentalizing skills and the cognition effect.
- Individuals with higher mentalizing abilities exhibited a more pronounced cognition effect.
Conclusions:
- Findings support the role of mental state inferencing as a simulation mechanism in accessing word meaning.
- Individual differences in mentalizing capacity influence the strength of the cognition effect.
- This research provides empirical evidence linking theory of mind abilities to lexical semantic processing.
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