Occluding the face diminishes the conceptual accessibility of an animate agent

Abstract

The language that people use to describe events reflects their perspective on the event. This linguistic encoding is influenced by conceptual accessibility, particularly whether individuals in the event are animate or agentiveanimates are more likely than inanimates to appear as Subject of a sentence, and agents are more likely than patients to appear as Subject. We tested whether perceptual aspects of a scene can override these two conceptual biases when they are aligned: whether a visually prominent inanimate patient will be selected as Subject when pitted against a visually backgrounded animate agent. We manipulated visual prominence by contrasting scenes in which the face/torso/hand of the agent were visible vs. scenes in which only the hand was visible. Events with only a hand were more often associated with passive descriptions, in both production and comprehension tasks. These results highlight the power of visual prominence to guide how people conceptualise events. ARTICLE HISTORY

Describing Events: Changes in Eye Movements and Language Production Due to Visual and Conceptual Properties of Scenes

“…This is in line with Henderson et al (2018), who argued that conceptual aspects affect the perception of visual scenes more than visual ones. At the same time, however, this finding is at odds with Rissman et al (2018) who suggest that visual saliency may override conceptual saliency related to animacy. It is worth noting, however, that disentangling with certainty conceptual and visual saliency of animate vs. inanimate entities in depictions is highly problematic, since some of the characteristics (e.g., a possession of a face) that are intrinsic animate features (i.e., conceptual) may also increase their visual saliency.…”

“…That is, participants’ looking behavior in a free-viewing scene description task was affected more by conceptual aspects than by visually salient objects when meaning maps representing the spatial distribution of semantic features and saliency maps representing the distribution of image features were compared directly (e.g., Henderson et al, 2018). In contrast, a study by Rissman et al (2018) focusing on participants’ written descriptions of transitive events seems to indicate a reversed effect. In particular, these authors demonstrated that conceptual properties such as animacy of an agent can be overridden when the agent is visually backgrounded (i.e., by only presenting the agent’s torso or hand; see Rissman et al, 2018).…”

“…In contrast, a study by Rissman et al (2018) focusing on participants’ written descriptions of transitive events seems to indicate a reversed effect. In particular, these authors demonstrated that conceptual properties such as animacy of an agent can be overridden when the agent is visually backgrounded (i.e., by only presenting the agent’s torso or hand; see Rissman et al, 2018). Asked to describe visual scenes of transitive events in which an animate agent performed an action on an inanimate entity, participants used more passive constructions when the animate agent was perceptually minimized than when not (Rissman et al, 2018).…”

“…This was true despite the fact that participants judged both full and partial agents to have the same degree of animacy, suggesting that visual saliency may have the potential to override an effect as important as the animacy of the agent. Crucially, however, since participants in the study by Rissman et al (2018) were asked to type their responses, it remains unclear which role both factors (animacy and visual saliency) play during spoken language production – a question addressed in the present study. Unlike previous studies, we not only focused on participants’ structural choices (i.e., the rate of active vs. passive sentences) but also included analyses of speech onset times, as well as participants’ looking behavior during the course of an utterance planning and production (by means of eye tracking).…”

“…In particular, these authors demonstrated that conceptual properties such as animacy of an agent can be overridden when the agent is visually backgrounded (i.e., by only presenting the agent’s torso or hand; see Rissman et al, 2018). Asked to describe visual scenes of transitive events in which an animate agent performed an action on an inanimate entity, participants used more passive constructions when the animate agent was perceptually minimized than when not (Rissman et al, 2018). This was true despite the fact that participants judged both full and partial agents to have the same degree of animacy, suggesting that visual saliency may have the potential to override an effect as important as the animacy of the agent.…”