The agent preference in visual event apprehension

A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing, and if so, whether the effect persists across different animacy configurations and task demands. Here we contrast event apprehension in two tasks and two languages that encode agents differently; Basque, a language that explicitly case-marks agents (‘ergative’), and Spanish, which does not mark agents. In two brief exposure experiments, native Basqueand Spanish speakers saw pictures for only 300 ms, and subsequently described them or answered probe questions about them. We compared eye fixations and behavioral correlates of event role extraction with Bayesian regression. Agents received more attention and were recognized better across languages and tasks. At the same time, language and task demands affected the attention to agents. Our findings show that a general preference for agents exists in event apprehension, but it can be modulated by task and language demands.

Arrate Isasi-Isasmendi, Caroline Andrews, Monique Flecken, Itziar Laka, Moritz M. Daum, Martin Meyer, Balthasar Bickel, Sebastian Sauppe; The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension. Open Mind 2023; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00083

人类体验与沟通的核心要素之一，即在“行为者”（施事者）与“受事者”（行为承受者）的角色中对事件的理解。此类事件角色植根于普遍认知，并在语言中得到了显著的编码，其中行为者因其显著性而更受青睐。一个悬而未决的问题是，这种对行为者的偏好是否在感知阶段就已经存在，即事件处理的最早期阶段，并且如果存在，这种影响是否会在不同的生物存在配置和任务需求中持续存在。在本研究中，我们对比了两种任务和两种语言中事件感知的差异，这两种语言在行为者编码上存在差异；一种是巴斯克语，该语言明确区分行为者（‘及物’），另一种是西班牙语，后者不标记行为者。在两个简短曝光实验中，巴斯克语和西班牙语的母语者仅对图片进行了300毫秒的观察，随后描述了这些图片或回答了关于它们的探测问题。我们通过贝叶斯回归比较了事件角色提取的眼动注视和行为相关性。在跨语言和任务中，行为者获得了更多的关注并得到了更好的识别。同时，语言和任务需求影响了行为者的关注。我们的研究结果表明，在事件感知中存在一种对行为者的普遍偏好，但这种偏好会受到任务和语言需求的影响。