Search

Events are a fundamental part of human experience. Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing central aspects of how humans perceive, conceptualize, communicate about, and remember events. This symposium offers an interdisciplinary look at recent advances in the study of event cognition. The symposium brings together cognitive scientists from across continents, who are experts on the subject. The symposium contributors come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neuro-computational psychology, and linguistics. They combine a variety of innovative and integrative approaches and methodologies and study diverse populations across the lifespan and across languages. The overall goal of this symposium is to foster an interdisciplinary conversation on different aspects of event cognition.

Traditional event cognition research typically characterises events as continuous, each bounded by a single beginning and a single ending. Daily events, however, often seem to involve discontinuities. For instance, if one is in a meeting that is temporarily interrupted by a phone call, one retains two events—the meeting and the phone call—rather than three, which include the meeting before the phone call, the phone call itself, and the meeting subsequent to the call. This study explores what binds events together across these discontinuities in everyday life. We examined five potential binding factors: place, people, topic, activity, and goal. Fifty-one participants provided data on recent non-contiguous daily life events, revealing that 97% of these events were tied by the 'Activity' aspect, followed by the 'Place' aspect (82%) and 'Goal' aspect (56%). 'People' (48%) and 'Topic' aspects (24%) were less significant in unifying non-contiguous events. The proportion of each event aspect in non-contiguous events suggests a need to expand theories of event cognition to focus on what brings events together rather than solely on what separates them—a perspective often overlooked in cognitive event theories.

Research in event cognition highlights the crucial role of event segmentation in shaping perceptions and memories. Anticipation of event boundaries is influenced by characteristic duration, often assumed to follow normal distributions in daily events. This study replicates recent investigations into event duration using a nightly segmentation approach with continuously captured daily images. Forty-one participants collected images over fourteen days, segmenting them into events. Event durations for various activities were modelled using truncated normal, exponential and gamma models. Our findings align with prior research in event distribution, revealing that overall, an exponential or gamma distribution provides a superior fit compared to a truncated normal distribution. This suggests that when daily events are studied in an ecological context at a fundamental level, most of them have little sign of a typical duration. Consequently, duration estimation is unlikely to play a large role in anticipating event boundaries.

Event cognition research has typically considered events to be contiguous in time, with defined starts and ends. However, people sometimes engage in more than one event at the same time. If this happens frequently, then theories of event cognition may require modification. This research study aims to estimate how often people engage in multitasking in daily life. Ninety-seven participants were asked whether they had been multitasking at four time points during the last 24 hours. Forty-five per cent of responses reported multitasking with a diverse range of event structures. Twenty-one per cent of reports specifically listed multiple overlapping activities. The prevalence of multitasking suggests that theories of event cognition need to be expanded to accommodate non-contiguous and simultaneous events.

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called "event segmentation." Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD.

Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called "events." Yet we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be linked because of their proximity to one another, but we can also build links between events that occur farther apart in time. Intuitively, some kind of organizing principle should enable temporally distant events to become bridged in memory. We tested the hypothesis that episodic memory exhibits a narrative-level organization, enabling temporally distant events to be better remembered if they form a coherent narrative. Furthermore, we tested whether post-encoding memory consolidation is necessary to integrate temporally distant events. In three experiments, participants learned and subsequently recalled events from fictional stories, in which pairs of temporally distant events involving side characters ("sideplots") either formed one coherent narrative or two unrelated narratives. Across participants, we varied whether recall was assessed immediately after learning, or after a delay: 24 hours, 12 hours between morning and evening ("wake"), or 12 hours between evening and morning ("sleep"). Participants recalled more information about coherent than unrelated narrative events, in most delay conditions, including immediate recall and wake conditions, suggesting that post-encoding consolidation was not necessary to integrate temporally distant events into a larger narrative. Furthermore, post hoc modeling across experiments suggested that narrative coherence facilitated recall over and above any effects of sentence-level semantic similarity. This reliable memory benefit for coherent narrative events supports theoretical accounts which propose that narratives provide a high-level architecture for episodic memory.

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.

Research in event cognition has focused on how people perceiveand remember events under experimental conditions. Thisresearch study aims to explore the temporal duration ofself-reported events from daily life (Sreekumar, et al., 2018;Zhuang, et al., 2012). The small amount of prior work thatexists suggests that daily event durations have a Gaussiandistribution and that people have prior beliefs that reflect thisreality (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006). Forty-eight participantsprovided activity duration data as they went about theireveryday lives for 14 days. Descriptive analyses and activityduration modeling (mixture models of gaussian, gamma, normaland exponential distributions) were used to characterize eventdurations within activity types. Results show that most of theevents present an exponential pattern of durations, while othersshow a bimodal pattern. Although some preplanned events havea characteristic time, many daily events have a substantialexponential component.

Event segmentation theory posits that we segment continuous experience into discrete events and event boundaries occur at large transient increases in prediction error, often related to context changes. Identifying event boundaries a priori has been difficult in naturalistic settings. To overcome this challenge for story listening, we used a deep learning language model (GPT2) to compute the predicted probability distributions of the next word, at each point in the story. For 3 stories, we computed the surprise, the entropy, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD). We then asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to compare the GPT2 measures and the human segmentation data. Preliminary results indicate that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in KLD. This supports the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation, and points to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error.

Life's events are scattered throughout time, yet we often recall different events in the context of an integrated narrative. Prior research suggests that the hippocampus, which supports memory for past events, can support the integration of overlapping associations or separate events in memory. However, the conditions that lead to hippocampus-dependent memory integration are unclear. We used functional brain imaging to test whether the opportunity to form a larger narrative (narrative coherence) drives hippocampal memory integration. During encoding of fictional stories, patterns of hippocampal activity, including activity at boundaries between events, were more similar between distant events that formed one coherent narrative, compared with overlapping events taken from unrelated narratives. One day later, the hippocampus preferentially supported detailed recall of coherent narrative events, through reinstatement of hippocampal activity patterns from encoding. These findings demonstrate a key function of the hippocampus: the integration of events into a narrative structure for memory.

Current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that memory abnormalities are central to the development and persistence of symptoms. While the most notable memory disturbances in PTSD involve memory for the trauma itself, individuals often have trouble remembering aspects of everyday life. Further, people with PTSD may have difficulty segmenting ongoing activity into discrete units, which is important for our perception and later memory of the activity. The current study investigated whether PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity predicted event segmentation and memory for everyday activities. To do so, 63 people with PTSD and 64 controls with a trauma history watched, segmented, and recalled videos of everyday activities. Viewers with higher PTSD symptom severity showed lower agreement on locations of event boundaries and recalled fewer fine-grained actions than did those with lower symptom severity. These results suggest that PTSD symptoms alter event segmentation, which may contribute to subsequent memory disturbances.

When people observe everyday activity, they spontaneously parse it into discrete meaningful events. Individuals who segment activity in a more normative fashion show better subsequent memory for the events. If segmenting events effectively leads to better memory, does asking people to attend to segmentation improve subsequent memory? To answer this question, participants viewed movies of naturalistic activity with instructions to remember the activity for a later test, and in some conditions additionally pressed a button to segment the movies into meaningful events or performed a control condition that required button-pressing but not attending to segmentation. In 5 experiments, memory for the movies was assessed at intervals ranging from immediately following viewing to 1 month later. Performing the event segmentation task led to superior memory at delays ranging from 10 min to 1 month. Further, individual differences in segmentation ability predicted individual differences in memory performance for up to a month following encoding. This study provides the first evidence that manipulating event segmentation affects memory over long delays and that individual differences in event segmentation are related to differences in memory over long delays. These effects suggest that attending to how an activity breaks down into meaningful events contributes to memory formation. Instructing people to more effectively segment events may serve as a potential intervention to alleviate everyday memory complaints in aging and clinical populations.

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the time series of prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study complex human activity and how it is perceived and remembered, it is valuable to have large-scale, well-characterized stimuli that are representative of such activity. We present the Multi-angle Extended Three-dimensional Activities (META) stimulus set, a structured and highly instrumented set of extended event sequences performed in naturalistic settings. Performances were captured with two color cameras and a Kinect v2 camera with color and depth sensors, allowing the extraction of three-dimensional skeletal joint positions. We tracked the positions and identities of objects for all chapters using a mixture of manual coding and an automated tracking pipeline, and hand-annotated the timings of high-level actions. We also performed an online experiment to collect normative event boundaries for all chapters at a coarse and fine grain of segmentation, which allowed us to quantify event durations and agreement across participants. We share these materials publicly to advance new discoveries in the study of complex naturalistic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]