Laurinavichyute Anna, Ziubanova Anastasia, Lopukhina Anastasiya
Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Aug 15;8:1012-1036. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00157. eCollection 2024.
Eye movements in the visual world paradigm are known to depend not only on linguistic input but on such factors as task, pragmatic context, affordances, etc. However, the degree to which eye movements may depend on task rather than on linguistic input is unclear. The present study for the first time tests how task constraints modulate eye movement behavior in the visual world paradigm by probing whether participants could refrain from looking at the referred image. Across two experiments with and without comprehension questions (total = 159), we found that when participants were instructed to avoid looking at the referred images, the probability of fixating these reduced from 58% to 18% while comprehension scores remained high. Although language-mediated eye movements could not be suppressed fully, the degree of possible decoupling of eye movements from language processing suggests that participants can withdraw at least some looks from the referred images when needed. If they do so to different degrees in different experimental conditions, comparisons between conditions might be compromised. We discuss some cases where participants could adopt different viewing behaviors depending on the experimental condition, and provide some tentative ways to test for such differences.
在视觉世界范式中，眼动不仅取决于语言输入，还取决于任务、语用情境、可供性等因素。然而，眼动在多大程度上依赖于任务而非语言输入尚不清楚。本研究首次通过探究参与者是否能避免看向所指图像，来测试任务限制如何在视觉世界范式中调节眼动行为。在有和没有理解问题的两个实验中（共159名参与者），我们发现，当指示参与者避免看向所指图像时，注视这些图像的概率从58%降至18%，而理解分数仍保持较高水平。尽管语言介导的眼动不能被完全抑制，但眼动与语言处理可能解耦的程度表明，参与者在需要时可以至少从所指图像上撤回一些注视。如果他们在不同实验条件下以不同程度这样做，那么条件之间的比较可能会受到影响。我们讨论了一些参与者可能根据实验条件采用不同观看行为的情况，并提供了一些测试此类差异的初步方法。
