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 506
Context- and Event-Predictive-Inference Go Hand-in-Hand
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Martin Butz
Martin Butz
Cognitive Science Center, Department of Computer Science, Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Germany
While we all receive continuous, dynamic sensory and motor information about our bodies and the outside environment, phenomenologically, we perceive a stable spatiotemporally segmented world. That is, we perceive and control dynamic interaction events as well as stative, durative events. We can even name these events verbally. Recent evidence suggests that event perception as well as the choice and execution of eventive interactions with our environment is embedded in a contextual frame, which appears to seamlessly focus cognition solving the frame problem. Within this contextual frame we plan, process, and control our perception, attention, and behaviour. Our cognitive modelling work shows that the installation of a contextual frame yields simulated model behaviour that best fits with human behaviour. Meanwhile, the work shows that contextual frame inference minimizes cognitive effort, which is quantified as changes in belief densities. Projecting the principle of contextual frame inference into problem solving domains – such as when solving tasks of an intelligence test or tasks of the abstraction and reasoning corpus (ARC) benchmark – similar contextual framing seems to be key to infer task-suitable eventive interactions and event progressions. It thus appears that cognition is segmented into events that are embedded into self-inferred contextual frames. The precise structure of such contextual frames, their goal-directed inference, and their more general involvement in cognition, however, still needs to be studied in further detail.