Event Perception
Barbara Tversky, Jeffrey M. Zacks · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
Every waking moment, we are confronted with a continuous changing multimodal stream of information. To make sense of that information stream and to act effectively in the world, we need to reduce it to useful chunks. One important kind of chunk is an , an integrated unit of space and time that has a beginning, middle, and end: having breakfast, attending class, seeing a movie. Events themselves are segmented into parts: buying a ticket, finding a seat, viewing the movie. A variety of cognitive and perceptual features converge at event boundaries; they are instants of relatively greater change in action, they are moments when goals and subgoals are accomplished, they are times when predictability breaks down. Event units are convenient packets for perception, comprehension, inference, prediction, imitation, learning, and planning.