Submission 177
Experimental Insights into Narrative Comprehension: The Role of Event Boundaries and Codality
SymposiumTalk-02
Presented by: Markus Huff
Narratives are central to human cognition and societal participation, providing the means by which individuals organize their experiences, communicate meaning, and coordinate understanding. Comprehending narratives requires transforming the continuous flow of perceptual and linguistic input into structured representations of events and maintaining coherence across changing contexts. Our experimental program investigates how such transformations are guided by event boundaries and representational codality.
Across a series of behavioral studies using visual narratives (i.e., comics), we provide converging evidence for distinct cognitive processes underlying narrative understanding. Measures of viewing time, event segmentation, and comprehensibility indicate that large coherence breaks elicit the construction of new event models, whereas smaller disruptions engage inferential updating within an ongoing representation. When information crosses representational codalities—such as between images and text—processing costs increase, reflecting the effort of recoding between symbolic systems. Temporal analyses further demonstrate that this cross-codal integration occurs immediately upon encountering new codality information.
Together, these findings support an integrative framework in which segmentation, updating, and cross-codal recoding jointly structure narrative comprehension. Event boundaries emerge as moments of cognitive reorganization that coordinate attention, working memory, and prediction, allowing continuous experience to be framed into meaningful, communicable units. This synthesis connects empirical evidence from narrative processing with broader theories of event cognition, memory, and predictive control in complex dynamic environments.