Keeping the Result in Sight and Mind: General Cognitive Principles and Language-Specific Influences in the Perception and Memory of Resultative Events.

Keeping the Result in Sight and Mind: General Cognitive Principles and Language-Specific Influences in the Perception and Memory of Resultative Events. Cogn Sci. 2019 Jan;43(1): Authors: Sakarias M, Flecken M Abstract We study how people attend to and memorize endings of events that differ in the degree to which objects in them are affected by an action: Resultative events show objects that undergo a visually salient change in state during the course of the event (peeling a potato), and non-resultative events involve objects that undergo no, or only partial state change (stirring in a pan). We investigate general cognitive principles, and potential language-specific influences, in verbal and nonverbal event encoding and memory, across two experiments with Dutch and Estonian participants. Estonian marks a viewer's perspective on an event's result obligatorily via grammatical case on direct object nouns: Objects undergoing a partial/full change in state in an event are marked with partitive/accusative case, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized increased saliency of object states and event results in Estonian speakers, as compared to speakers of Dutch. Findings show (a) a general cognitive principle of attending carefully to endings of resultative events, implying cognitive saliency of object states in event processing; (b) a language-specific boost on attention and memory of event results under verbal task demands in Estonian speak...
Source: Cognitive Science - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research