The priority of the agent in visual event perception: On the cognitive basis of grammatical agent-patient asymmetries

Verfaillie, Karl; Daems, Anja

doi:10.1515/cogl.1996.7.2.131

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…it could be asymmetrical). Indeed, Agent primacy and saliency effects have been observed in both the linguistics and vision literature: Agents tend to precede Patients in linguistic utterances (Dryer, 2013; Goldin-Meadow, So, Ozyürek, & Mylander, 2008), and in continuous event perception, Agents attract attention, likely because they initiate movement before Patients (Abrams & Christ, 2003; Mayrhofer & Waldmann, 2014; Verfaillie & Daems, 1996) or because active body postures direct spatial attention (Freyd, 1983; Gervais, Reed, Beall, & Roberts, 2010; Shirai & Imura, 2016).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…whether Agent trials should be faster or slower) depends on different theories about the interaction between event perception and the building of event structure. Under the view that Agents attract attention because of their active posture or movement initiation (e.g., Gervais et al, 2010; Verfaillie & Daems, 1996), one would predict faster RTs to Agent trials relative to Patient trials, since the primary task of participants was to locate the target actor. Under the view that observing Agents triggers the building of an event structure (Cohn & Paczynski, 2013; Cohn, Paczynski, & Kutas, 2017), attending to Agents (i.e.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

2018

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A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, i.e. who acted on whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (i.e. the actor) and Patients (i.e. the one acted upon) from visual input, but do we rapidly and spontaneously encode such roles even when our attention is otherwise occupied? In three experiments, participants observed a continuous sequence of two-person scenes and had to search for a target actor in each (the male/female or red/blue-shirted actor) by indicating with a button press whether the target appeared on the left or the right. Critically, although role was orthogonal to gender and shirt color, and was never explicitly mentioned, participants responded more slowly when the target's role switched from trial to trial (e.g., the male went from being the Patient to the Agent). In a final experiment, we demonstrated that this effect cannot be fully explained by differences in posture associated with Agents and Patients. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure from visual scenes is rapid and spontaneous.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

2018

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“…First, on the basis of intuition, we selected verbs referring to situations that frequently include an agent and/or patient. For example, an arresting situation necessarily includes someone doing the arresting and someone being arrested; the agent and patient are intrinsic to the situation (Verfaillie & Daems, 1996). Linguistically, this type of situation tends to be expressed by a transitive verb.…”

Section: Schemasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Verbs, Situation Schemas, and Thematic Role Concepts

Ferretti

Masamune

Hatherell

2001

Journal of Memory and Language

288

310

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“…This ordering also persists in the signs of deaf children who have not learned a sign language (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Goldin-Meadow & Feldman, 1977) and the gestures of non-signing adults asked to communicate without speaking (Gershoff-Stowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2002), independent of their native spoken language (Goldin-Meadow, So, Ôzyûrek, & Mylander, 2008). In addition, agents are typically recognized faster than patients in pictures and films of events (Robertson & Suci, 1980; Segalowitz, 1982; Webb, Knott, & Macaskill, 2010), even when these agents are represented by geometric shapes (Verfaillie & Daems, 1996). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cohn

Paczynski

Kutas

2017

Brain and Cognition

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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.

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The priority of the agent in visual event perception: On the cognitive basis of grammatical agent-patient asymmetries

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

Integrating Verbs, Situation Schemas, and Thematic Role Concepts

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

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