Agents’ goals affect construal of event endpoints

Abstract

Theories of event cognition have hypothesized that the boundaries of events are characterized by change, including a change in the agent’s goal, but the role of higher-order goal information in how people conceptualize events is currently not well-understood. In a series of experiments, we used a novel method to test whether goals can affect how viewers determine when an event ends. Participants read a context sentence stating an agent’s goal (e.g., “Jesse wants to eat the orange for her breakfast”, “Jesse wants to use the orange as a garnish”). Participants then saw an image of a partly complete visual outcome (e.g., a partly peeled orange) and were asked to identify whether an event had occurred (“Did she peel the orange?”). Participants were more likely to accept a partly complete outcome if the outcome satisfied the agent’s goal (Experiments 1 and 2). This goal effect was present even when participants saw an image that corresponded to a mostly complete visual outcome (e.g., a mostly peeled orange; Experiment 3). Our results offer the first direct evidence in support of the conclusion that higher-order goal information affects the way even simple physical events are conceptualized. They further suggest that theories of event cognition need to account for the rich and varied informational sources used by the human mind to represent events.