These event models facilitate predictions as to what will occur in the environment, and as long as incoming information is consistent with these predictions the current event model remains active. According to EST, observers form models in working memory called event models that guide the perception of incoming information. Event Segmentation Theory (EST) provides a computationally and neurophysiologically explicit account of event structure perception ( Reynolds, Zacks, & Braver, 2007 Zacks et al., 2007). These results indicate that observers are sensitive to event boundaries even when they are not explicitly attending to event structure.Īlthough it is clear that observers can and do perceive the structure of events, it is not yet clear what leads to the perception of this structure. Although participants did not know about the segmentation task during the original viewing of the movies, a network of regions in the brain increased in activity around the points in time participants later identified as boundaries between units of activity. After watching the movies, the same observers segmented the movies into individual events. In one study ( Zacks et al., 2001a), observers watched movies of everyday events while they were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Although these instructions are somewhat vague, there is good agreement both across and within individuals as to where one unit of activity ends and another begins ( Newtson, 1976 Speer, Swallow, & Zacks, 2003 Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001b), and observers are able to adjust their grain of segmentation in order to identify larger or smaller units of activity.Įvent structure can also be measured implicitly using physiological measures, such as neuroimaging. The perceived structure of events can be measured explicitly by simply asking people to watch movies of everyday events and identify the points where they believe one meaningful unit of activity ends and another begins ( Newtson, 1973). These event schemata (also referred to as ‘scripts’ or ‘structured event complexes’) provide a framework for incoming information, such that the active representation of the current event (the event model) is made up of information about the current state of the world, as well as information about similar, previously encountered states ( Zacks, Speer, Swallow, Braver, & Reynolds, 2007). Knowledge about the structure of events is essential to function in the world, and is used to fill in missing information, predict what is going to happen in the future, and plan actions ( Grafman, 1995 Hommel, 2006 Abelson, 1981 Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Such events have specific structures, and involve particular objects, characters, and goals. Representative examples include a person opening a door, a couple driving to the store, and a baseball game. The everyday-language term ‘event’ refers to things that may be very brief (a lightning strike) or very long (the birth of a solar system), but the psychological events we are concerned with here have durations on a human scale, spanning a few seconds to tens of minutes ( Barker & Wright, 1954 Dickman, 1963). This process is called event structure perception, and the discrete units, or events, are defined as segments of time at particular locations that are perceived by observers to have beginnings and endings ( Zacks & Tversky, 2001). The world is presented to us as a stream of continuous information, but we are able to perceive this information as a series of discrete units ( Newtson, 1973 Zacks & Tversky, 2001). Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events, and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. A third study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than other clauses, and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relationship. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, interactions with objects, and goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. However, the converging predictions of these theories had not previously been tested directly. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters’ goals in order to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted.
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