PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Studies that monitor attention in depicted event scenes during utterance comprehension show that people prefer to rely on depicted events rather than their stereotypical knowledge. However, the presence of depicted events in the scene may have exaggerated their importance. Two eye-tracking experiments examined this issue by varying the accessibility of scene information. When we varied the visual presence of the scene (the scene disappeared before the utterance was heard), findings confirmed a greater relative priority of depicted events (Experiment 1). In contrast, when we altered the temporal extension of scene events (scene presentation emulated that they had been completed), people neither had a preference to rely on depicted events nor on their stereotypical knowledge (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the visual presence of scene events cannot account for the preference to rely on depicted events. We discuss our findings in the context of research on the accessibility of events in discourse comprehension (e.g., Zwaan, Maaden, & Whitten, 2000).