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Pathogen stress associates with human collective semantic changes in language
Poster D18 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Ze Fu1, Huimin Chen2, Zhan Liu2, Maosong Sun2, Zhiyuan Liu2, Yanchao Bi1,3; 1Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, 2Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 3Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, China
The neurobiology studies of semantics mainly focus on the biological principles underlying the backbone semantic structures in the human brain. While semantic representation is commonly assumed to be (at least partly) derived from sensorimotor interaction with the external world, whether and how it is dynamically modulated by salient external variables is poorly understood. Here, we study one such salient variable: pathogens. Infectious diseases have been a major cause of death throughout human history. The human cultural evolution framework assumes that these stress variables have broadly shaped human psychology. To address whether and how the human collective semantic space is shaped by pathogens, we conducted three studies using large-scale text analyses: one cross-sectional study and two longitudinal studies. We focused on the backbone semantic dimensions identified based on decades of neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and cognitive studies, including sensory-motor, time, space, number, cognition, emotion, and social dimensions (i.e., neurocognitive dimensions). Study 1 investigated the cross-sectional associations between pathogens and semantic variations in 43 countries. To assess the intensity of neurocognitive semantic dimensions, we analyzed word frequencies derived from millions of texts on social media platforms in each country. We found a positive association between pathogen severity and the intensity of sensory-motor-related dimensions, which could not be accounted for by alternative socio-cultural factors such as cultural tightness or general economic wealth. Instead, the previously highlighted associations between pathogens and cultural tightness were mediated by human sensory-motor semantic processing. Study 2 examined the longitudinal associations between pathogens and changes in the intensities of backbone semantic dimensions. Historical word frequency data (Google n-gram) and pathogen data spanning the past 100 years in four countries were analyzed: the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and China. Variations in pathogen severity over time were linked to significant changes in the usage frequency of sensory-motor-related words. To establish potential causality, we conducted Granger causality tests and difference-in-difference analyses. The pathogen-leading patterns were observed in Italy and China. Study 3 extended the findings of Study 2 by utilizing independent decade-wise word embedding data (Corpora of Historical America, COHA) in the United States, which allowed us to examine broader concepts in terms of their representation patterns along the neurocognitive semantic dimensions. Again, we found that word representations along the sensory-motor dimension in the embedding space shift in response to pathogen changes. Taken together, these results highlight the universal dynamic mechanisms of collective semantics, indicating that pathogen stress potentially drives sensorial-oriented semantic processing. These findings clearly mark the beginning of understanding human semantic memory from the perspective of the response-to-stress variable. Additionally, they raise new questions about the neural mechanisms, the consequences on a broad range of behaviors, the potential accumulation processes of such changes, and their role in the cultural evolution of human cognition.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Computational Approaches