Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults represent events in terms of abstract participant roles (e.g., when Edith eats chocolate, Edith is an agent and thechocolate is a patient) (Rissman & Majid, 2019). English, however, lacks commonly-known labels for these roles, whichmay make the distinction less accessible to people. We presented 42 English-speakers with 24 pictures of an agent actingon a patient (e.g., one person kicking another). A red dot marked the agent in half the pictures and marked the patientin the other half. We asked participants to sort the pictures into two piles using whatever criteria they liked. After threeopportunities to sort the pictures, only 55% of participants sorted into agent/patient piles. When the remaining 45% weregiven the agent/patient piles, only half were able to explain the basis for the sort. This suggests a disconnect betweenthe robustness of agent/patient categories in implicit processing and the availability of this seemingly basic distinction toexplicit reasoning.