Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.

Infectious diseases have been major causes of death throughout human history and are assumed to broadly affect human psychology. However, whether and how conceptual processing, an internal world model central to various cognitive processes, adapts to such salient stress variables remains largely unknown. To address this, we conducted three studies examining the relationship between pathogen severity and semantic space, probed through the main neurocognitive semantic dimensions revealed by large-scale text analyses: one cross-cultural study (across 43 countries) and two historical studies (over the past 100 years). Across all three studies, we observed that increasing pathogen severity was associated with an enhancement of the sensory-motor dimension in the collective semantic space. These patterns remained robust after controlling for the effects of sociocultural variables, including economic wealth and societal norms of tightness. These results highlight the universal dynamic mechanisms of collective semantics, such that pathogen stress potentially drives sensorially oriented semantic processing.