Enhancement of visual attention precedes the emergence of novel metaphor interpretations.

Emergence of creative ideas often involves sudden linking of unrelated ideas. Here we demonstrate that the production of insights about novel metaphor was preceded by prolonged visual inspection of metaphorical sentences. The participants made free spoken responses in a task requiring the generation of semantic interpretations about visually presented sentences, where gaze locations were continuously monitored.

A neural network model of metaphor understanding with dynamic interaction based on a statistical language analysis: targeting a human-like model.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a model that represents the human process of understanding metaphors, focusing specifically on similes of the form an "A like B". Generally speaking, human beings are able to generate and understand many sorts of metaphors. This study constructs the model based on a probabilistic knowledge structure for concepts which is computed from a statistical analysis of a large-scale corpus.