09:00 - 10:30
Parallel sessions 1
09:00 - 10:30
Room: HSZ - N3
Chair/s:
Karin Maria Bausenhart, Markus Huff, Jeffrey M Zacks
Human cognition is shaped by the way humans perceive and segment continuous, dynamic, complex, and multimodal perceptual input into meaningful, discrete episodes. Such events and their boundaries (transitions that separate meaningful units of experience from each other) play a crucial role in structuring memory, guiding attention, and enhancing understanding. Perceiving an event boundary – for example, triggered by changes in time, location, protagonist, goal, or social interaction – evokes updates in working memory and thereby prompts the formation of new or adaptation of existing event models. This segmentation process may thus enhance comprehension and recall by creating clear divisions between contexts, allowing individuals to better encode, retrieve, and reason about sensory experience. Events and their boundaries also influence predictive processes: within a given event, reliable forecasts can be made based on contextual continuity and abstract event schemata, but predictions become less reliable when crossing event boundaries. Recent models suggest that increased uncertainty and error in predictive processing in itself may drive the updating of event models in working memory, thus reinforcing the link between predictive processing and event segmentation. Overall, events and their boundaries serve as fundamental units of organization in cognitive processing, enabling humans to make sense of and coherently act upon a dynamic and often unpredictable world. In this symposium, we will present novel empirical and theoretical developments from psychology and cognitive science that explore the functions and mechanisms of event cognition. We will focus in particular on how boundaries affect the perception and segmentation (vs. integration) of dynamic input, how event models are formed within and across modalities, and how dynamic input, schema-based prediction, and contextual factors interplay to shape event representations and higher-level cognitive processes such as categorization, memory, and problem-solving.
Submission 430
Tracking Objects Beyond View Boundaries: Role of Attention, Memory and Metacognition
SymposiumTalk-01
Presented by: Jiri Lukavsky
Jiri Lukavsky
Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
In everyday life, we often need to keep track of multiple objects in our environment. Moreover, these objects get occluded or move out of our visual field and we must rely on our memory. We have showed that tracking objects which often disappear beyond the view’s boundary is possible but difficult (Lukavský et al., 2023). Interestingly, under these difficult settings people achieved similar performance in tracking identities relative to usually easier location tracking. We concluded that once people cannot rely on grouping mechanisms, they start to employ additional strategies.

In a subsequent experiment, we decided to assess both confidence and performance in multiple object tracking task. We tested 50 children (age 5 to 7 years) with a gamified version of the task where they tracked 1 to 3 targets out of 8 objects and they assigned one or two stars to each target candidate marking their confidence in the response. After each trial, they were shown the correct responses and how their score adjusted based on the number of stars and correctness of the response. We found no age-related differences in the tracking accuracy (mean 79%) or score (mean 85 out of 132, range 26 to 128). We observed some age-related responses patterns, e.g. younger kids tended not to maximize their score in easy tasks. While the ability to assess confidence might seem unrelated to tracking performance, it aids participants in making informed guesses, thereby influencing their overall performance implicitly.