Event Schema Research Articles

Who dun it? The influence of actor-patient animacy and type of verb in the making of causal attributions

Several recent studies have claimed that English verbs that describe interactions between two participants (e.g., Dave helped John) have inherent causality that gives greater weight to one of the two interactants. In this study verb type and animacy of the sentence participants were varied orthogonally in order to determine whether the verb alone was responsible for people's causality attributions. College students were asked to judge why the particular experience or activity described in a sentence had occurred. Three classes of verbs were used. Verb type interacted with animacy such that the students consistently attributed causality to the sentence subject for some verb types and to the sentence object for others, depending upon the animacy of the subjects and objects. The students' causality ratings were related to prototypicality ratings of the same stimuli from a previous study. Causality ratings were also sensitive to the type of task (rating vs. free-response). Results are discussed in terms of the notion of event schema as it applies to sentences. In particular, the animacy of different participants in the schema interacts with different types of actions or states to alter people's judgments about which schema part is targeted as unusual, hence causal.

Remembering and planning talk between mothers and children

Three aspects of temporally displaced (TD) talk between mothers and children were explored: the role of the knowledge base in such talk, the effect of mother talk on child talk, and the impact of such talk on the child's knowledge base. Mother‐child (2‐year‐old) speech was observed in three contexts: (a) routine or scripted; (b) free play; and (c) novel play. Such talk occurred almost exclusively in the scripted context and its topics were predominantly based on other routine activities in which the dyad was not presently engaged. These results point to the strong influence of the knowledge base in terms of event schemas (representations of routine activities) in supporting TD talk. Maternal talk was characterized by the use of adverbial temporal markers, hypothetical and conditional expressions, conversational routines, and Wh‐ questions. These aspects of maternal speech indicate “scaffolding” and may facilitate the child's acquisition of the appropriate form, content, and organization of TD talk. Analys...

Spinning Fantasy: Themes, Structure, and the Knowledge Base

The influence of the child's knowledge base, in terms of event schemas, on symbolic play behavior was investigated. The pretend play behavior of 10 mother-child (2-0 to 2-4) dyads was observed in 2 play contexts. Play was examined for thematic content and the following structural components: self-other relations, substitute/imaginary objects, action integration, and planfulness. The highest levels of symbolic play behavior emerged in pretense episodes whose thematic content was event based. Additionally, thematic content affected the respective roles of mother and child in the construction of pretense. In pretense activity based on themes with which the child was familiar (e.g., routine events), the child, as well as the mother, participated in advanced levels of symbolic play activity, coconstructing pretense. In pretense based on themes unfamiliar to the child, the mother was almost exclusively responsible for the pretense. Thus, the development of child symbolic play appears to be related to the knowledge base in that its emergence is domain-specific--limited to themes for which the child has knowledge--before being more widely manifested.

The effects of schematic memory on imaginal information processing: An empirical assessment

AbstractThe relationship between verbal and nonverbal modes of processing consumer information was examined in an investigation of schematic processing, a predominantly verbal mode, and visual imagery, a nonverbal method of information processing. It was found that individuals with a schema for a marketing event exhibited both a higher incidence and greater vividness of imagery during retrieval than did subjects without a schema. No differences were observed in either the frequency or clarity of images related to actions of varying degrees of abstraction in the event schema. These results indicate interdependence between schematic and imaginal processing consistent with the Cyclical Processing Model (Hampson and Morris 1979). A number of implications, both methodological and strategic, are developed from the observed relationship between imaginal and schematic information processing.

On Intemperance in its Medical and Social Aspects

Abstract The posterior medial network is at the apex of a temporal integration hierarchy in the brain, integrating information over many seconds of viewing intact, but not scrambled, movies. This has been interpreted as an effect of temporal structure. Such structure in movies depends on pre-existing event schemas, but temporal structure can also arise de novo from learning. Here we examined the relative role of schema-consistent temporal structure and arbitrary but consistent temporal structure on the human posterior medial network. We tested whether, with repeated viewing, the network becomes engaged by scrambled movies with temporal structure. Replicating prior studies, posterior medial regions were immediately locked to stimulus structure upon exposure to intact but not scrambled movies. However, for temporally structured scrambled movies, functional coupling within the network increased across stimulus repetitions, rising to the level of intact movies. Thus, temporal structure is a key determinant of network dynamics and function in the posterior medial network.