Directional asymmetry in event schema activation

Event schemas are important for event cognition because they support the activation of causal antecedents and causal consequences. However, an open question is whether there are biases toward the activation of antecedents versus consequences. This study investigated the activation of antecedents and consequences within event schemas. In two experiments, participants read a sentence describing an action within a schema and were then asked to judge if a second action was related to the former action. The directionality (antecedent or consequence) and temporal distance of the second action were manipulated. Experiment 1 explicitly instantiated the schema by providing a sentence describing the event but Experiment 2 did not. Both experiments revealed a robust consequence bias such that participants verified consequences faster and more accurately than antecedents. A cross-experiment analysis indicated that both antecedents and consequences were activated when the schema was instantiated relative to when it was not, albeit there was still a consequence bias. The implications of these findings for theories of event perception and text comprehension are discussed.