Going beyond the Spatial Agency Bias

When a person reads or hears a sentence, what kind of visuospatial representation do they construct? Prior work has proposed a Spatial Agency Bias, according to which people conceptualize events with a left-to-right trajectory, with the left side associated with agency (at least in languages using left-to-right scripts). However, researchers disagree on the source and robustness of the Spatial Agency Bias. We suggest that a key obstacle stems from insufficient testing of how agentivity relates to other concepts. We report two experiments manipulating voice, thematic role and word order. Our results point to a general Prominence Bias: Factors that make entities more prominent/salient favor left-side placement

Depiction · Interrogative · Salient · Transitive relation · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Spatial Cognition and Navigation · Spatial Neglect and Hemispheric Dysfunction