Binding and retrieval within and across events?
Wed-H3-Talk 8-7902
Presented by: Birte Moeller
Birte Moeller 1, Christian Beste 2, Alexander Münchau 3, Christian Frings 1
1 University of Trier, 2 University of Dresden, 3 University of Lübeck
How do we make sense of the environment we live in? An influential field in cognitive psychology suggests that many important functions like memory of incidents, reasoning, and attention depend on the way we segment the ongoing stream of perception (Zacks & Swallow, 2007). An open question still is, how the structure generated from a perceptual stream translates into behavior. To address this question, we combined the findings in event segmentation literature with another influential body of literature that analyzes mechanisms behind the control of individual actions (Frings et al., 2020). In particular, we analyzed how two very basic mechanisms in action control (integration and retrieval) are affected by boundaries between events. Two scenarios with different characters were used to implement events and boundaries between events. In two experiments, we measured binding and retrieval between individually executed responses that could be part of the same or separate events. In Experiment 1 (n = 40) we found binding effects only for responses that were integrated within an event, but not for responses that had to be integrated across an event boundary. In Experiment 2 (n = 77) we found that the effect of retrieval of a past response on further actions was hampered by an event boundary. Together, the experiments indicate that the structure we pick up from our environment can translate into ongoing action via modulation of the two basic mechanisms binding and retrieval.
Keywords: Action control; event file; response-response binding; event segmentation