Entropy in Semantic Memory Navigation in Blind and Sighted Individuals: The Effect of Visual Experience

A study comparing blind and sighted individuals found that visual experience shapes how people navigate semantic memory. Sighted participants showed higher entropy for abstract concepts, while blind participants had higher entropy for visually salient concrete concepts, indicating that visual grounding influences conceptual organization.

arXiv:2607.12185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied accounts of semantic memory highlight the role of sensorimotor systems in acquiring and storing knowledge. Congenitally blind populations offer a critical test bed for these assumptions, providing an opportunity to assess whether conceptual grounding requires visual experience. In this study, we assessed semantic memory navigation differences between blind and sighted individuals using a property listing task with concrete and abstract concepts. We computed semantic entropy, an embedding-based natural language processing metric that captures the predictability of retrieval. Generalized linear mixed models revealed distinct navigation patterns across groups: while sighted individuals showed higher entropy for abstract than concrete concepts, blind participants did not. Instead, blind individuals exhibited higher entropy for visually salient concrete concepts e.g., penguin . These results underscore the role of visual experience in the organization and dynamic navigation of semantic memory.