Eye-tracking situated language comprehension: Immediate actor gaze versus recent action events

Previous visual world eye-tracking studies have shown that when a sentential verb can refer (via tense information on the verb and on a following time adverb) to either a recent and a future action event performed by an actor, people inspected the target of the recent event more often than the (different) target of the future event. This ’recent event preference’ replicated even when the frequency of future events within the experiment greatly exceeded the frequency of recent events (e.g., 75% vs 25%). The recent event preference may arise because the past action is situation-immediate and thus more relevant at the particular point in time when the sentence is processed (at that point participants have seen the past action performed and will not see the future action until after the sentence). If the situation-immediate relevance of a cue is responsible for the recent event preference, then we should be able to “overwrite” the effect of the recent action with another situation-immediate cue. Accordingly, two current eye-tracking experiments pitted the recent event preference against a situation-immediate cue, the shift in the actor’s gaze to the target object. Given that interlocutors’ gaze has been shown to be a powerful cue in guiding listeners’ attention to objects in the visual context, we hypothesized that the actor’s gaze to the future target should rapidly guide a listener’s attention to it. Analyses revealed indeed that listeners’ visual attention was rapidly guided to the target by the actor’s gaze; crucially the gaze cue was particularly helpful in guiding looks to the future target. Importantly, however, we still replicated the overall preference to look at the recent target regardless of tense and gaze; and even for future gaze conditions, the preference was not immediately reversed, suggesting it is surprisingly robust in competition with a situation-specific future-biasing cue.