Search

Perceivers spontaneously segment ongoing activity into discrete events. This segmentation is important for the moment-by-moment understanding of events, but may also be critical for how events are encoded into episodic memory. In 3 experiments, we used priming to test the possibility that perceptual event boundaries organize memory for everyday activity into episodic units. Viewers watched movies of everyday activities, such as someone washing a car, and then performed a yes-no recognition task using pictures taken from the movies. Some target pictures were preceded by a prime picture taken from 5 s previously in the movie. This produced priming, reducing response times for the target picture. Priming was greater when the prime was part of the same perceptual event as the target than when it was part of a different event, suggesting that event structure organizes episodic memory. This effect persisted when the sequence of activity was scrambled during encoding, which suggests that it reflects, in part, knowledge about event types and not just the specifics of a given episode. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans spontaneously organize a continuous experience into discrete events and use the learned structure of these events to generalize and organize memory. We introduce theStructured Event Memory(SEM) model of event cognition, which accounts for human abilities in event segmentation, memory, and generalization. SEM is derived from a probabilistic generative model of event dynamics defined over structured symbolic scenes. By embedding symbolic scene representations in a vector space and parametrizing the scene dynamics in this continuous space, SEM combines the advantages of structured and neural network approaches to high-level cognition. Using probabilistic reasoning over this generative model, SEM can infer event boundaries, learn event schemata, and use event knowledge to reconstruct past experience. We show that SEM can scale up to high-dimensional input spaces, producing human-like event segmentation for naturalistic video data, and accounts for a wide array of memory phenomena.

In this target article, Logie makes a strong case for considering variation when seeking to understand mechanisms of memory and cognition. As he puts it, “people may use their cognition in different ways to perform the same task in the laboratory and in everyday life” (Logie, 2018, p. 472). We heartily concur. Here, we underline this message by providing additional examples of inter-individual and between-group variation from research related to our areas of expertise, and extend this point by considering intra-individual variation across different instances of task performance. Our examples come from research in cognitive control, memory, everyday cognition, and cognitive aging.

An important feature of action understanding is that comprehenders segment the perceptual stream into events. Event segmentation dynamically engages a network of brain regions that likely play a role in how events are encoded. Here, in a sample of older adults, we assessed the relationship between changes in brain dynamics during movie watching and event understanding performance. Forty healthy older adults and a comparison sample of 12 younger adults passively viewed short movies of everyday activities while their brain activity was measured with fMRI. Afterward, they segmented the movies into events and performed memory tasks for movie content. The older adults engaged a similar event segmentation network during movie watching as the younger adults. Individual differences analyses revealed that although behavioral measures of event segmentation predicted memory, activity in the segmentation network did not. Intersubject correlation analyses revealed that normative brain dynamics during viewing in the right posterior temporal sulcus and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex predicted better segmentation performance. These data suggest that these regions play an important role in event understanding, and also that the event segmentation network is preserved in healthy aging. (PsycINFO Database Record

Readers construct mental models of situations described by text. Activity in narrative text is dynamic, so readers must frequently update their situation models when dimensions of the situation change. Updating can be incremental, such that a change leads to updating just the dimension that changed, or global, such that the entire model is updated. Here, we asked whether older and young adults make differential use of incremental and global updating. Participants read narratives containing changes in characters and spatial location and responded to recognition probes throughout the texts. Responses were slower when probes followed a change, suggesting that situation models were updated at changes. When either dimension changed, responses to probes for both dimensions were slowed; this provides evidence for global updating. Moreover, older adults showed stronger evidence of global updating than did young adults. One possibility is that older adults perform more global updating to offset reduced ability to manipulate information in working memory.

Recent studies of rapid resumption—an observer’s ability to quickly resume a visual search after an interruption—suggest that predictions underlie visual perception. Previous studies showed that when the search display changes unpredictably after the interruption, rapid resumption disappears. This conclusion is at odds with our everyday experience, where the visual system seems to be quite efficient despite continuous changes of the visual scene; however, in the real world, changes can typically be anticipated based on previous knowledge. The present study aimed to evaluate whether changes to the visual display can be incorporated into the perceptual hypotheses, if observers are allowed to anticipate such changes. Results strongly suggest that an interrupted visual search can be rapidly resumed even when information in the display has changed after the interruption, so long as participants not only can anticipate them, but also are aware that such changes might occur.

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in predictions arise, an event boundary is perceived. According to the theory, the perception of events depends on both sensory cues and knowledge structures that represent previously learned information about event parts and inferences about actors' goals and plans. Neurological and neurophysiological data suggest that representations of events may be implemented by structures in the lateral prefrontal cortex and that perceptual prediction error is calculated and evaluated by a processing pathway, including the anterior cingulate cortex and subcortical neuromodulatory systems.

Events can be understood in terms of their temporal structure. The authors first draw on several bodies of research to construct an analysis of how people use event structure in perception, understanding, planning, and action. Philosophy provides a grounding for the basic units of events and actions. Perceptual psychology provides an analogy to object perception: Like objects, events belong to categories, and, like objects, events have parts. These relationships generate 2 hierarchical organizations for events: taxonomies and partonomies. Event partonomies have been studied by looking at how people segment activity as it happens. Structured representations of events can relate partonomy to goal relationships and causal structure; such representations have been shown to drive narrative comprehension, memory, and planning. Computational models provide insight into how mental representations might be organized and transformed. These different approaches to event structure converge on an explanation of how multiple sources of information interact in event perception and conception.

How do people perceive routine events, such as making a bed, as these events unfold in time? Research on knowledge structures suggests that people conceive of events as goal-directed partonomic hierarchies. Here, participants segmented videos of events into coarse and fine units on separate viewings; some described the activity of each unit as well. Both segmentation and descriptions support the hierarchical bias hypothesis in event perception: Observers spontaneously encoded the events in terms of partonomic hierarchies. Hierarchical organization was strengthened by simultaneous description and, to a weaker extent, by familiarity. Describing from memory rather than perception yielded fewer units but did not alter the qualitative nature of the descriptions. Although the descriptions were telegraphic and without communicative intent, their hierarchical structure was evident to naive readers. The data suggest that cognitive schemata mediate between perceptual and functional information about events and indicate that these knowledge structures may be organized around object/action units.

Manipulating the way a graph is drawn influences viewers' ability to extract information from it. In a series of experiments with simple bar graphs, the authors varied the rendering characteristics and relative heights of the bars and asked participants to estimate the quantities portrayed. The addition of 3-dimensional (3D) perspective depth cues lowered accuracy. This accuracy disadvantage diminished when a short delay was introduced before judgments were reported. The height of the judged bar relative to nearby graphical elements also affected accuracy; this effect was about 1 order of magnitude larger and remained intact when the delay was introduced. Nearby elements also affected viewers' bias (under- or overestimatio n). These effects do not seem to be due to misestimation of object depth. The results suggest that warnings about accuracy decrements due to 3D shading may be overstated, whereas distortions due to neighboring elements should be of more concern.