A ‘Not’ Changes Everything - NeuroscienceNews.com
The way the brain processes negated adjectives — ‘not bad’ or ‘not good’ — is not understood. Previous studies suggest that negated phrases are processed more slowly and with more errors than their affirmative counterparts.
Cutting-edge artificial neural networks appear to be largely insensitive to the contextual impacts of negation, leading many researchers to wonder how negation operates.
In lab-based experiments, 78 participants were asked to read affirmative or negated adjective phrases, good/bad, not good/not bad, happy/sad, not happy/not sad etc. on a screen and rate their meaning on a scale of one (really really bad/really really sad) to ten (really really good/really really happy).
Answers took longer for negated adjectives and interpreted meaning was more varied. Cursor tracking showed that people are slower to interpret them, first understanding them to be affirmative before modifying towards their opposite meaning.