Event boundaries in memory and cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.08.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Event elements changes are event boundaries, thus creating new event models.

  • Information beyond the current event model is less available.

  • Long-term memory is influenced by the structure of event models.

  • Event cognition research provides insights into individual differences.

  • Neuroscience research continues to support theoretical advances in event cognition.

Research on event cognition is rapidly developing and is revealing fundamental aspects of human cognition. In this paper, we review recent and current work that is driving this field forward. We first outline the Event Horizon Model, which broadly describes the impact of event boundaries on cognition and memory. Then, we address recent work on event segmentation, the role of event cognition in working memory and long-term memory, including event model updating, and long term retention. Throughout we also consider how event cognition varies across individuals and groups of people and consider the neural mechanisms involved.

Section snippets

Event segmentation as a trigger of attention

The updating of a current event model at an event boundary entails a transient increase in computation. Neuroimaging studies have found that there is a large, distributed response at event boundaries during ongoing comprehension, independent of whether viewers attend to segmentation [6, 27, 28, 29]. This activity can be tied to processing of changes in action features, including movement [30], and event dimensions such as location, characters, and objects [6, 28]. This has behavioral

The primacy of the current event model in working memory

Experiences, whether real or fictional, are rarely about a single scene or event. The action moves from one event to another, and comprehension requires people to update their understanding. The Event Horizon Model proposes that information in the current event model is highly available, whereas information that is part of a prior model is less available. As one example, people are less able to recognize recently seen objects in movies following an event boundary [53] and are slower to

The organization of long-term memory by causal connections

The Event Horizon Model proposes that event models processing is heavily influenced by causal connectivity. One recent study [61] used a narrative reading paradigm to test this. During comprehension, readers must access long-term memory to resolve anaphoric references in a text, and causal breaks could contribute to slowing in memory access. When readers experience a failure of their predictions they update their event models, resulting in slower reading times (e.g. [62]). It was hypothesized

Events as a means of organizing and chunking information

Effects of event structure on long-term memory are stable over long periods. While memory for verbatim and propositional meaning units are lost quite rapidly, event model memory is much better retained [63]. The Event Horizon Model proposes a coupling between the structure of ongoing experience and long-term event memory: Events form the episodes in episodic memory. In text memory, after reading, narrative sentences from the same event prime each other more than sentences from adjacent events [

Events and retrieval interference

The influence of event structure impeding memory is clearly seen with the location updating effect. This phenomena is found when people walk through doorways. In an initial experiment, people navigated a virtual environment and were probed for the identity of objects they were carrying [74]. After picking up an object and walking a fixed distance, memory was poorer if that walk included a doorway. This effect occurs both when the probes are pictures as well as labels, when people need to

Conclusions

Event cognition is a rapidly emerging field of study that has implications for a wide range of cognitive phenomena. This includes the processing of actions as they are unfolding in the moment, the using of event knowledge to manage information in working memory, and the retrieval of knowledge from long-term memory. Finally, this field of study has matured to the point that it has provided some revealing insights about various individual and group differences.

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

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