Summary: Recent research introduces “anendophasia” as a term for the absence of self-talk, revealing that not everyone experiences self-talk. The study compared adults with low and high levels of inner speech, revealing significant differences in their cognitive abilities.
Those with minimal inner language had more difficulty with their verbal working memory and rhyme judgment, although their task-switching abilities were unaffected. This study highlights the important role that inner speech plays in certain cognitive functions.
Highlights:
- Definition of anendophasia: The term “anendophasia” was coined to describe a lack of inner speech, which varies greatly among adults, from abundant to absent.
- Impact on cognitive tasks: Individuals with minimal inner speech demonstrate lower performance on tasks involving verbal working memory and rhyme judgment, highlighting the functional role of inner speech in these areas.
- Selective cognitive influence: The absence of inner speech does not uniformly affect all cognitive processes; for example, task-switching abilities are not affected, indicating a complex relationship between inner speech and cognitive functions.
Source: Neuroscience news
Self-talk, or the internal monologue that narrates, debates, and processes information in linguistic form, is often considered a constant companion in our minds.
However, new research is challenging this notion, introducing the term “anendophasia” to describe individuals who rarely, if ever, experience inner speech.
The study focused on exploring the behavioral implications of anendophasia through four separate experiments.
Participants were divided into two groups based on their self-reported levels of self-talk. Members of the low internal speech group (N = 46) demonstrated significantly poorer performance on verbal working memory tasks compared to their counterparts in the high internal speech group (N = 47).
This finding suggests that the ongoing dialogue we engage with ourselves may play a crucial role in our ability to retain and manipulate information in our minds.
Additionally, the study assessed participants’ ability to make rhyme judgments, a task that typically benefits from verbal processing.
Again, individuals with minimal inner speech faced more challenges, indicating that inner speech can facilitate the type of linguistic manipulation required for such tasks.
This is consistent with the theory that inner speech supports a range of verbal activities, from reading and comprehension to linguistic creativity.
Interestingly, not all cognitive functions associated with verbal processing were affected by levels of inner speech.
Performance on task switching, which involves shifting attention between tasks and would benefit from endogenous verbal cues, did not differ significantly between the two groups.
Additionally, the study found no significant categorical effects on perceptual judgments related to self-talk, suggesting that the influence of self-talk may be more nuanced, affecting some areas of cognitive function while sparing others. ‘others.
This study not only expands our understanding of the variability of human cognitive experiences, but also opens new avenues for examining how the presence or absence of inner speech might influence various aspects of psychological functioning and behavior.
About this research news in anendophasia and neuroscience
Author: Current communications in neuroscience
Source: Neuroscience news
Contact: Neuroscience news communications – Neuroscience news
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Closed access.
“Not everyone has an inner voice: behavioral consequences of anendophasia” by Johanne SK Nedergaard et al. Psychological sciences
Abstract
Not everyone has an inner voice: behavioral consequences of anendophasia
It is commonly accepted that inner speech – the experience of thought as it occurs in natural language – is a human universal.
Recent data, however, suggest that the experience of inner speech in adults varies from almost constant to nonexistent.
We propose a name for the lack of experience of inner speech – anendophasia – and report four studies examining some of its behavioral consequences.
We found that adults who reported low levels of self-talk (NOT = 46) had poorer performance on a verbal working memory task and more difficulty judging rhymes than adults who reported high levels of inner speech (NOT = 47).
Task-switching performance – previously linked to endogenous verbal cues – and categorical effects on perceptual judgments were unrelated to differences in inner speech.
News Source : neurosciencenews.com
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