Perceiving, remembering, and communicating structure in events.

Abstract

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.

Event perception: A mind-brain perspective.

“…However, when activity is less coherent coarsegrained event segmentation may break down, because prediction error will be uniformly high on coarse timescales, leaving only fine-grained segmentation intact. Data from experiments in which people segment the same activities multiple times at different timescales support this hypothesis (Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001;Speer, Swallow, & Zacks, 2003;Lozano, Hard, & Tversky, in press;Hard, Lozano, & Tversky, in press;Hard, Tversky, & Lang, in press). In these experiments, participants segmented activities at both a coarse and a fine grain, on different viewings.…”

The effects of scrambling episode components on memory for a picture story: Not understanding, but recognizing what you saw

“…Picture stories and everyday activities can be segmented into structures referred to as events (Zacks & Tversky, 2001). An event involves a specific object, character, or goal that has a specified beginning and ending.…”

“…Alternatively, the complication and resolution might both contain an overlapping event, in which the boy climbs up the light pole to get the balloon and climbs down afterward. Segmenting events can occur within video (Carroll & Bever, 1975;Hard, Tversky, & Lang, 2006;Newston 1973), a series of static scene images in a picture story (Gernsbacher, 1985;Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust;, and written text (Baggett, 1979;Gernsbacher, 1985;Speer & Zacks, 2005;Zacks, Speer, & Reynolds, 2009;Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001). Event Segmentation Theory provides an explanation for the perception of these discrete events in vision, through the interaction of both bottom-up and topdown processes Zacks, Speer, Sallow, Braver, & Reynol 2007;Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001).…”

“…According to Event Segmentation Theory Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001) the process of event perception begins with the observ gathering low-level perceptual information from the environment. This information is processed and given semantic labels, and is used to construct an event model for the perceived event.…”

Internal representations, external representations and ergonomics: towards a theoretical integration

“…Such conceptual structures are not only able to represent conceptual knowledge of objects, but also conceptual knowledge of events and typical action sequences, as in Schank and Abelson's (1977) discussion of 'scripts'. Scripts are a particular implementation of schema theory that relate specifically to everyday events and typical goal-directed activities (Zacks et al 2001). Wilson and Rutherford (1989) discuss the relationships and distinctions between LTM constructs such as schemata and scripts (which are sometimes also seen as being an implementation of Minsky's 1975 notion of 'frames').…”