Unfolding meaning in context: The dynamics of conceptual similarity

How are relationships between concepts affected by the interplay between short-term contextual constraints and long-term conceptual knowledge? Across two studies we investigate the consequence of changes in visual context for the dynamics of conceptual processing. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they viewed a visual depiction of e.g. a canary in a birdcage (Experiment 1), or a canary and three unrelated objects, each in its own quadrant (Experiment 2). In both studies participants heard either a semantically and contextually similar "robin" (a bird; similar size), an equally semantically similar but not contextually similar "stork" (a bird; bigger than a canary, incompatible with the birdcage), or unrelated "tent". The changing patterns of fixations across time indicated first, that the visual context strongly influenced the eye movements such that, in the context of a birdcage, early on (by word offset) hearing "robin" engendered more looks to the canary than hearing "stork" or "tent" (which engendered the same number of looks), unlike in the context of unrelated objects (in which case "robin" and "stork" engendered equivalent looks to the canary, and more than did "tent"). Second, within the 500 ms post-word-offset eye movements in both experiments converged onto a common pattern (more looks to the canary after "robin" than after "stork", and for both more than after "tent"). We interpret these findings as indicative of the dynamics of activation within semantic memory accessed via pictures and via words, and reflecting the complex interaction between systems representing context-independent and context-dependent conceptual knowledge driven by predictive processing.