Not so secret agents: Event-related potentials to semantic roles in visual event comprehension

Abstract

Research across domains has suggested that agents, the doers of actions, have a processing advantage over patients, the receivers of actions. We hypothesized that agents as “event builders” for discrete actions (e.g., throwing a ball, punching) build on cues embedded in their preparatory postures (e.g., reaching back an arm to throw or punch) that lead to (predictable) culminating actions, and that these cues afford frontloading of event structure processing. To test this hypothesis, we compared event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to averbal comic panels depicting preparatory agents (ex. reaching back an arm to punch) that cued specific actions with those to non-preparatory agents (ex. arm to the side) and patients that did not cue any specific actions. We also compared subsequent completed action panels (ex. agent punching patient) across conditions, where we expected an inverse pattern of ERPs indexing the differential costs of processing completed actions as a function of preparatory cues. Preparatory agents evoked a greater frontal positivity (600–900ms) relative to non-preparatory agents and patients, while subsequent completed actions panels following non-preparatory agents elicited a smaller frontal positivity (600–900ms). These results suggest that preparatory (vs. non-) postures may differentially impact the processing of agents and subsequent actions in real time.

Understanding of Active and Passive Constructions in 7- to 10-Year-Old Russian-Speaking Children: Reliance on Inflections or Word Order

“…The stability of the word order rule we found may be linked to the agent advantage in event recognition: If the Agent is in the first place, that facilitates the interpretation of events (Cohn, Paczynski, & Kutas, 2017;Hafri, Trueswell, & Strickland, 2018). The retention of events in long-term memory might possibly also be associated with the Agent advantage, and this might explain the widespread overgeneralization of the word order rule in children between 3.5 and 4 years old, when access to episodic memory becomes available.…”

Event Perception and Memory

“…Observers can extract this configuration from pictures presented as briefly as 37 ms and subsequently masked (Hafri et al 2012), and information about the roles of agent and patient is quickly bound to other features of the entities involved (Hafri et al 2018). Information about an entity's role (Hafri et al 2012) and what it might do (Cohn et al 2017) is often available from its pose: People acting as agents generally have more stretched-out body poses than those on whom they are acting, and the windup to a kick appears quite different from the windup to a throw. There appears to be a regularity to the time course of establishing an event configuration, with agents usually being identified first (Webb et al 2010).…”

Your Brain on Comics: A Cognitive Model of Visual Narrative Comprehension

“…For example, characters in preparatory postures about to carry out a subsequent action (e.g., an agent reaching back an arm to punch) have been shown to elicit more agreement about their subsequent actions than the panels of characters who might receive those actions (i.e., patients) (Cohn & Paczynski, ). These expectancies appear to facilitate subsequent information, as panels following such preparatory postures are viewed faster than those following panels of patients (Cohn & Paczynski, ), and removing such preparatory cues lead to neural costs (Cohn, Paczynski, & Kutas, ). Such findings are consistent with other work showing anticipatory processing in event cognition (Eisenberg et al., ; Zacks, Kurby, Eisenberg, & Haroutunian, ).…”