Rethinking task importance in the visual world paradigm

Although the term Visual World Paradigm (henceforth VWP) is used to refer to the broad class of studies in which participants eye movements are measured as they listen to language, that is about a circumscribed visual display (henceforth the visual world), there are, in fact, two broadly used variants of the paradigm. The first, introduced by researchers at Rochester in the mid-1990 s, typically used the visual world as a type of workspace that participants interact with, for example following instructions to perform an action or sequence of actions (e.g., “Put the apple on the towel in the box”; “Put the big candle into the trash. Now put the small tie into the blue square.”). The second, introduced by Gerry Altmann and colleagues, typically narrates an event or sequence of events, using a display with depicted objects and people (e.g., “The boy will eat the cake.”; “Donald is bringing some mail to Mickey while a violent storm is beginning. He’s carrying an umbrella…”) without asking participants to perform an accompanying action. While the approaches are often used to address similar questions, there are some, often implicit, differences between the assumptions that motivate the different approaches. But what are these assumptions? Are there types of questions for which one of the approaches is better suited than the other? Does the choice of approach affect linking hypotheses? We address these issues in a paper that takes the form of a dialogue, with MKT making the case for including tasks with actions and FH making the case for experiments without an additional action. After responding to each other’s arguments, we conclude by: (1) separating principled differences from associations that are tied to the types of questions that were first addressed in some of the foundational studies; (2) making suggestions for factors that should guide researchers’ choice of approach; and (3) proposing new avenues of research.