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 177
Experimental Insights into Narrative Comprehension: The Role of Event Boundaries and Codality
SymposiumTalk-02
Presented by: Markus Huff
Markus Huff 1, 2, Ayse Candan Simsek 1, Irina Brich 1, Frank Papenmeier 2, Martin Merkt 3
1 Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien Tübingen, Germany
2 Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Germany
3 German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning, Bonn, Germany
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.