Abstract
ABSTRACT The ability to predict upcoming actions is a hallmark of cognition. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour observed in controlled lab environments generalises to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (anticipatory eye movements) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of immersing participants in naturalistic scenes (Experiment 1), increasing the number of distractor objects (Experiment 2), modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents (Experiment 3), and manipulating the location of referents relative to the joint attentional space (Experiment 4). Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed for Experiments 1–3. The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, in Experiment 4. Our findings suggest that predictive processing occurs in everyday communication if the referents are situated in the joint attentional space. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand-in-hand in the study of human predictive behaviour.
Highlights
In the last few decades, there has been an increased interest in the role of prediction in language comprehension
The encountered linguistic information is compared against this forward model of anticipated linguistic information (Pickering & Garrod, 2007) and any prediction error is used as a learning mechanism that influences future predictions (Dell & Chang, 2014)
In the case of language processing, the encountered linguistic information is arguably compared against a forward model of anticipated linguistic information (Pickering & Gambi, 2018; Pickering & Garrod, 2007, 2013) and any prediction error is used as a learning mechanism that influences future predictions (Dell & Chang, 2014)
Summary
In the last few decades, there has been an increased interest in the role of prediction in language comprehension. The encountered linguistic information is compared against this forward model of anticipated linguistic information (Pickering & Garrod, 2007) and any prediction error is used as a learning mechanism that influences future predictions (Dell & Chang, 2014). Such theories are typically inspired by data collected via EEG and the visual world paradigm, the latter of which we will focus on in this study
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