Combinatorial semantics in the visual world: A representational account of real-time event processing

The experiments presented in this thesis sought to establish combinatorial effects operating within novel semantic priming paradigms. These experiments demonstrate the combining of several pieces of semantic information (specifically, what certain items afford in terms of some form of interaction) from objects within simple visual scenes, and an account is offered based on the construction of representations from these presented items. These composite representations subsequently facilitate responses to target items, but it is only with a combination of items (e.g. a knife and a tyre) that is felicitous to a particular event (e.g. bursting) that priming to target items (e.g. a burst tyre) obtains. Priming is less evident when a combination of items is presented that does not allow the same event to occur (e.g. a ruler and a tyre). These combinatorial processes appear to occur in longer time windows than those of automatic visual processes such as gist abstraction, and the representations activated upon viewing these stimuli appear to be specific to the objects presented.