Are Abstract Relational Roles Encoded Visually? Evidence from Priming Effects

Abstract:

It remains controversial whether the visual system encodes abstract relational roles such as Agent and Patient in visual events. The present experiment tested whether abstract role bindings induce priming effects across consecutive events. Each trial included a static target image preceded either by a brief silent video of a priming event or by an audio-visual presentation of an English sentence describing the same event. Example sentence: "The red goat on the left knocked down the blue goat on the right." 64 videos counterbalanced 4 event types: launching, deforming, breaking, and a relationally ambiguous control. The set of static targets were the final frames of the same videos. The role bindings were either repeated, switched, or ambiguous across the target and prime. The dependent variable was the latency on a color-localization task (e.g., whether the red animal was on the left or on the right). Whereas the linguistic primes had no statistically significant effect on the latency of the visual task, the role bindings of the video primes did have an effect: The latency on unambiguous trials (which required role binding) was significantly greater than that on ambiguous trials (on which at least one component lacked clear relational roles). This suggests the visual system is sensitive to (the ambiguity of) the role bindings of abstract relations.

Reprint (pdf) Ava Du's dissertation (2023, Chap. 4, pdf)
R script: Main analysis (html) R script: Learning curves (html)