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POPSResearchers can predict which noun a person is visualizing. Models such as this one could also be useful in diagnosing disorders of language or helping students pick up a foreign language. In semantic dementia, for example, people lose the ability to remember the meanings of things - shown a picture of a chihuahua, they can only recall 'dog', for example - but little is known about what exactly goes wrong in the brain. “We could look at what the neural encoding is for this,” says Mitchell.