Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

After viewing motion events with a starting-point (Source) and end-point (Goal), people mention the Goal more often and remember it more accurately than the Source. This Goal privilege has been hypothesized to arise from an on-line attentional bias that occurs during event apprehension itself, yet no data exists that: (a) documents this online attentional bias and (b) correlates any online bias with offline memory and linguistic measures. Here we do just that: we recorded participants’ eye movements as they viewed or prepared to describe motion events and later tested their memory of Goals or Sources. We find an online attentional bias for Goals over Sources during initial encoding of events. This bias is stronger during free inspection compared to speech planning, an effect likely to reflect the fact that sentence preparation partially promotes encoding and mentioning Sources. Moreover, the extent of the attentional Goal bias is systematically related to both language production and memory, such that the attentional Goal bias is greatest when the Source is not mentioned later during production or not remembered later at test. Thus, we provide the first evidence that an attentional Goal bias appears as soon as one starts to visually encode motion events.