ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2023
The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension.
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Broadening the Agent Preference Hypothesis Through Experiencers: Eye-Tracking and EEG Evidence of Proto-Agents and Proto-Patients.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Processing ergativity in compound light verb constructions: electrophysiological evidence from Hindi.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Agent Preference in Ontogeny: Predictability of Agent and Patient Roles in Child-Directed Utterances Across Languages.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Conceptualisation of event roles in L1 and L2 by Japanese learners of english: the effect of perspectives of event construal on recognition memory.Psychological research · 2025Article
- The effect of animacy on the agent preference: Self-paced reading evidence from Basque.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Scope of Message Planning: Evidence From Production of Sentences With Heavy Sentence-Final NPs.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Mark the Unexpected! Animacy Preference and Directed Movement in Visual Language.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Spontaneous Encoding of Event Roles in Hominids.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Article
- A universal preference for animate agents in hominids.iScience · 2024Article
- Surprisal From Language Models Can Predict ERPs in Processing Predicate-Argument Structures Only if Enriched by an Agent Preference Principle.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent ("doer") and patient ("undergoer" of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing, and if so, whether the effect persists across different animacy configurations and task demands. Here we contrast event apprehension in two tasks and two languages that encode agents differently; Basque, a language that explicitly case-marks agents ('ergative'), and Spanish, which does not mark agents. In two brief exposure experiments, native Basque and Spanish speakers saw pictures for only 300 ms, and subsequently described them or answered probe questions about them. We compared eye fixations and behavioral correlates of event role extraction with Bayesian regression. Agents received more attention and were recognized better across languages and tasks. At the same time, language and task demands affected the attention to agents. Our findings show that a general preference for agents exists in event apprehension, but it can be modulated by task and language demands.
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