Do we predict upcoming speech content in naturalistic environments?

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a hallmark of cognition. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour observed in controlled lab environments generalises to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (anticipatory eye movements) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of immersing participants in naturalistic scenes (Experiment 1), increasing the number of distractor objects (Experiment 2), modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents (Experiment 3), and manipulating the location of referents relative to the joint attentional space (Experiment 4). Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed for Experiments 1–3. The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, in Experiment 4. Our findings suggest that predictive processing occurs in everyday communication if the referents are situated in the joint attentional space. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand-in-hand in the study of human predictive behaviour.

预测即将发生行为的能力，是认知能力的标志性特征之一。然而，目前尚不清楚在受控实验室环境中观察到的预测行为，是否能够推广至丰富多样的日常场景中。本研究通过四项虚拟现实实验，验证了在通过以下方式提升实验范式自然性时，语言预测的公认指标——预期眼动（anticipatory eye movements）——是否能够重复出现：一是将被试沉浸于自然场景中（实验1），二是增加干扰项物体的数量（实验2），三是调整可预测名词所指对象的占比（实验3），四是操控所指对象相对于共同注意空间（joint attentional space）的位置（实验4）。实验1至实验3均观察到了显著的预期眼动效应，但实验4中的预期眼动效应消失了。本研究结果表明，当所指对象处于共同注意空间中时，日常交流中确实存在预测性加工过程。从方法论层面而言，本研究证实了在人类预测行为的研究中，生态效度与实验控制可以实现兼顾统一。