Poster C24, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Goal Bias in the Visual World
Kyra Krass1, Gerry Altmann1;1University of Connecticut
Throughout our lives, we are taught that setting goals is vital to success; this helps us plan for our next steps. However, this bias towards goals is more pervasive and ingrained than one might think. Previous literature has shown that individuals have a goal bias that is demonstrated by better recall of a goal than a source, more descriptive language about a goal than a source, and a focus on the goal when planning an action (e.g., Cohen & Rosenbaum, 2004; Lakusta & Landau, 2012; Papafragou, 2010). We were interested if individuals also showed a goal bias in the Visual World Paradigm. Our first experiment measured anticipatory eye movements toward the initial and end states when hearing sentences containing a change-of-state action; we used reversible verbs (e.g., open/close), verbs of destruction (e.g., eat), and verbs of creation (e.g., bake). For the reversible items such as “The pedestrian will open the umbrella”, individuals looked more to an open umbrella (i.e. the goal) than a closed one. This pattern was replicated in the creation items. For example, when hearing “The friend will knit the sweater”, individuals looked more to the end state of a sweater than an initial state of a ball of yarn. However, no differences were found for destruction items. Despite our robust effect for reversible items, one possible confound was that the results could be interpreted as a bias towards the goal (an open umbrella is the goal of “opening”) or a bias to interpret the verb as an adjective (looking to an open object when hearing “open”). Therefore, we ran a second study where half of the items used a verb that could be interpreted as an adjective (e.g., open the umbrella) and half could not (e.g., land the plane). The results again showed that there were more looks to the end than the initial state. We in fact found that there were numerically more looks to the end state in the non-adjective condition (“land”) than the condition where the verb can be interpreted as an adjective (“open”). This confirms that the goal of the action was driving looks. This second study also included destruction and creation verbs with more items. The creation items (e.g., knit) still showed a larger proportion of trials with looks to the end state than the initial. There were no differences found for the destruction items. These results suggest that destruction verbs show a different pattern of eye movements possibly because of the lack of a depicted goal (i.e., an empty plate is not the goal of eating). Together, these studies demonstrate that adults exhibit an anticipatory goal bias in the visual world paradigm when given reversible and creation verbs. Whereas previous studies (e.g. Altmann & Kamide, 1999) have been interpreted as eye movements reflecting object affordances, we believe that the present results require modification of this account, with anticipatory eye movements reflecting, at least in these cases, not what actions objects afford, but rather what goals those actions afford.
Themes: Meaning: Combinatorial Semantics, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics
Method: Eye Tracking