Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action

Abstract

Mental representations of everyday experience are rich, structured, and multimodal. In this article, we consider the adaptive pressures that led to humans’ construction of such representations, arguing that structured event representations enable cognitive systems to more effectively predict the trajectory of naturalistic everyday activity. We propose an account of how cortical systems and the hippocampus interact to construct, maintain, and update event representations. This analysis throws light on recent research on story comprehension, event segmentation, episodic memory, and action planning. It also suggests how the growing science base can be deployed to diagnose impairments in event perception and memory, and to improve memory for everyday events.

Finding events in a continuous world: A developmental account

“…First, what is the mechanism of event segmentation in adults (i.e., the end state of the developing system)? To this end, we will provide an overview of the adult literature, which largely supports the theory that event segmentation is the result of predictive mechanisms operating during event observation (Richmond & Zacks, ). Second, how do infants begin to segment events?…”

Prominent Inhibitory Projections Guide Sensorimotor Computation: An Invertebrate Perspective

“…[38][39][40] In C. elegans, the behavior of the nematode in the absence of food will change the navigational state from "searching" to "dispersal," each of which requires a distinct set of sensory neurons. [50][51][52][53] [41] Consequently, even animals with simple nervous systems are capable of a rapid response to the ongoing changes in the environment, and over time, they adapt to the new sensory state of their surroundings.…”

“…[110] Aquatic vertebrates, such as tadpoles and lampreys, also display the same bilateral action of CNs as observed in mammals. As sensorimotor networks evolve, interneurons allow computation of multimodal sensory integration, as evidenced in the nematode, [68,77,114,115] while in the fly, [79,80,100,101,116] rodent, [117] and mammalian brain, [50][51][52][53][118][119][120][121] the presence of layers of network structures demonstrates a hierarchical organization. Sensorimotor control loops are observed in the fly, where navigation is achieved via a combination of path integration (tracking position relative to a reference point) and known visual landmarks.…”

Fiction as Autobiography

“…In this section, I review research motivating and describing the powerful concept of mental models, also called situation models, which provides key principles for the nature of events both experienced and imagined (Johnson-Laird, 1983;Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978). For the sake of consistency, I will use the more general term mental model for the remainder of this document, although the terms situation model and event model (Richmond & Zacks, 2017) are often used to describe this idea as well.…”

“…Mental models are an abstract representation of crucial relationships, likely having adaptive value despite their relatively high computational cost because such models have great predictive power (Richmond & Zacks, 2017). This a critical function of an advanced nervous system.…”