Anticipatory eye movements revisited: From affordances and actions to consequences and states

The initial demonstration of anticipatory eye movements during sentence processing (Altmann & Kamide, 1999) found anticipatory looks towards the object that afforded the action referred to in the unfolding sentence. Here, we show that the object that affords the action is in fact dispreferred in the context of an object that instead affords the consequence of the action. We ran two studies to both confirm this bias and determine its malleability depending on the task. Our data suggest that looking behaviors (anticipatory or otherwise) are governed by the ubiquitous goal bias found in other cognitive domains. We offer a revised account of attentional biases in sentence processing that captures both action-based and goal-based biases in a unified approach to anticipatory event-based processes in language processing.