Event segmentation during first-person continuous events

Abstract

An important aspect of event cognition is the segmentation of activity into events. However, much of the research of event segmentation has involved materials that are very highly structured narratives or well-scripted everyday activities. The aim of the current work was to assess whether similar event segmentation would occur in first-person perspective events that were more continuous, weak in narrative structure, and less scripted. In this study, people viewed a series of videos of a first-person interactive environment and were asked to make event segmentation judgements. A content analysis of the videos was also done to compare with the event segmentation judgements. The data indicated that viewers monitored multiple dimensions of continuity when viewing the videos. Moreover, the perception of event boundaries was similar to research on narrative text and film, although there were some notable differences. Finally, there was evidence that viewers perceived a hierarchical structure of implicit goals such that shifts in the superordinate goals had a larger impact on event segmentation than subordinate goals. These data suggest that people construct event models for these sorts of events and speak to the generalisability of the event model construct to real-world experiences.