The influence of recent scene events on spoken comprehension: Evidence from eye movements

Evidence from recent experiments that monitored attention in clipart scenes during spoken comprehension suggests that people preferably rely on non-stereotypical depicted events over stereotypical thematic knowledge for incremental interpretation. The Coordinated Interplay Account [Knoeferle, P., & Crocker, M. W. (2006). The coordinated interplay of scene, utterance, and world knowledge: evidence from eye tracking. Cognitive Science, 30, 481–529.] accounts for this preference through referential processing (e.g., the verb mediates a depicted event) and the preferred use of scene event information that is associated with the referent (e.g., the agent of the depicted event). Three eye-tracking experiments examined the generality of this account. While the rapid use of depicted events was replicated in all three studies, the preference to rely on them was modulated by the decay of events that were no longer co-present. Our findings motivate the extension of the Coordinated Interplay Account with an explicit working memory. The coordinated interplay mechanism together with working memory and decay, is shown to account for the influence of scene-derived versus stored knowledge both when events are co-present and when they have recently been perceived.