To make sense of the continuous stream of perception in everyday life, the cognitive system organizes it into discrete, meaningful units called events. This structure of event perception has been shown to be highly critical as it influences important mechanisms like memory within and across events. One important dimension for segmenting sensory experience into events is the presence of spatial boundaries, such as walking through a doorway between two rooms (i.e., the location updating effect; Radvansky & Copeland, 2006). A previous study suggests that the perception of event boundaries also influences important action control mechanisms, with both binding and retrieval of actions being disrupted by boundary perception (Moeller et al., in press). Here, we investigated whether the same disruption in the binding of response representations occurs in a first-person perspective scenario involving perceptually similar events separated by a door as a boundary. In the present study (N = 76), we found that responses bound within an event produced stronger binding effects compared to responses that had to be bound across an event boundary. Our results replicate Moeller et al. (in press), demonstrating that event structure perception influences ongoing action control, and extend these findings to first-person perspective scenarios involving perceptually similar events.

References:
Moeller, B., Beste, C., Münchau, A., & Frings, C. (in press). Large scale event segmentation affects the micro-level action control processes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Radvansky, G. A., & Copeland, D. E. (2006). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space. Memory & cognition, 34, 1150-1156.