Previous visual world eye-tracking studies have shown that
when a sentential verb can refer (via tense information on the
verb and on a following time adverb) to either a recent and
a future action event performed by an actor, people inspected
the target of the recent event more often than the (different)
target of the future event. This ’recent event preference’ replicated
even when the frequency of future events within the experiment
greatly exceeded the frequency of recent events (e.g.,
75% vs 25%). The recent event preference may arise because
the past action is situation-immediate and thus more relevant at
the particular point in time when the sentence is processed (at
that point participants have seen the past action performed and
will not see the future action until after the sentence). If the
situation-immediate relevance of a cue is responsible for the
recent event preference, then we should be able to “overwrite”
the effect of the recent action with another situation-immediate
cue. Accordingly, two current eye-tracking experiments pitted
the recent event preference against a situation-immediate cue,
the shift in the actor’s gaze to the target object. Given that interlocutors’
gaze has been shown to be a powerful cue in guiding
listeners’ attention to objects in the visual context, we hypothesized
that the actor’s gaze to the future target should rapidly
guide a listener’s attention to it. Analyses revealed indeed that
listeners’ visual attention was rapidly guided to the target by
the actor’s gaze; crucially the gaze cue was particularly helpful
in guiding looks to the future target. Importantly, however, we
still replicated the overall preference to look at the recent target
regardless of tense and gaze; and even for future gaze conditions,
the preference was not immediately reversed, suggesting
it is surprisingly robust in competition with a situation-specific
future-biasing cue.