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.

摘要

预测即将发生的动作的能力是认知的标志。但是，尚不清楚在受控实验室环境中观察到的预测行为是否普遍适用于丰富的日常环境。在四个虚拟现实实验中，我们测试了通过将参与者沉浸在自然场景中（实验1），增加干扰对象的数量（例如，增加参与者的范式）来增加范式的自然性时，是否建立了完善的语言预测（预期眼动）标记实验2），修改可预测名词-指称物的比例（实验3），并操纵指称物相对于联合注意空间的位置（实验4）。实验1-3观察到了强劲的预期眼动。但是，预期效果在实验4中消失了。我们的发现表明，如果被访者位于联合注意空间中，则日常交流中会发生预测性处理。从方法上讲，我们的研究证实，在人类预测行为的研究中，生态有效性和实验控制可能并存。