In a series of aesthetic judgement tasks, we found that speakers of German display a spatial agency bias if, and only if, a scene shows an agent performing an action in the direction of a patient. The experiments reported here replicate and extend previous findings, indicating that the position of the agent relative to the patient affects how speakers perceive a depicted event. Moreover, the experiments are the first to show that the orientation of the agent and patient (toward vs. away from other event character) is another modulating factor affecting scene perception as well as scene description.
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