The Total Sum of the Parts

Kevin Gao
Ayse Candan
Psych 1140

Picture this: youre sitting back watching your favorite TV program. That relatively lowquality audiovisual signal is transmitted to your home at a rate of more than a thousand bits per
second, yet the rate at which you can encode that same information for later retrieval is vastly
lower, with most estimates around a few bits per second (Landauer, 1986). So how exactly does
human perception take care of this gap? The answer is event segmentation, or the idea that
people perceive things in such a way so that the continuity of space/time is segmented into
chunks of meaningful events. In this essay, we will compare two different aspects of event
segmentation described in the two research papers provided Zacks: J. M. & Swallow, K. M.
(2007) and Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. & Zwaan, R. A. (2001). Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M.
(2007) discusses event segmentation in terms of cognitive learning and memory, as well as
general applications. Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. & Zwaan, R. A. (2001) analyzes this phenomenon
in films and event indexing.

In Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. (2007), we learn that event segmentation is a natural,

ongoing process that occurs automatically. One of the largest pieces of evidence that portrays this
is in how people tend to organize events in films. In (Newtson, 1976; Speer, Swallow, & Zacks,
2003), participants were found categorizing the smaller fine-grained events and lumping them
together into larger, more meaningful events. In (Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001), the results were
similar, and the participants looked at the whole process of making a bed as if it were divided

into meaningful steps that made up a procedure. (Zacks, Braver, et al., 2001) provides even
stronger insight, creating an experiment that used scanners to monitor brain activity.

Brain activity in certain areas such as the frontal and posterior cortex spiked near and
around the moments of the movie that were categorized as the event boundaries. Brain activity
was larger for coarse-event boundaries than it was for fine- boundaries. Because the data was
received before any debriefing occurred, this suggest that the procedure couldnt have been
tampered by manually driven effort, and thus, it is highly likely that event segmentation happens
naturally without much thought.

This idea shows that not only do people chunk events automatically, but also it reveals
the innate skill that people have of being able to anticipate future events using experience from
long-term memory as well as learning heuristics from our working-memory. The aforementioned
ability to be able to judge boundaries is analyzed more in depth in Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. &
Zwaan, R. A. (2001). Here, the authors establish that a change in any one of the three spatial
features, time, movement, and region, should have a unique impact on situation-based
judgements. Also, it is reasonable to expect that a larger number of shifts at any given point in
the narrative would result in a higher likelihood for any observer to recognize this point or event
as the boundary. In other words, the old event is perceived to have officially stopped, with the
new event perceived to have begun. However, even though adjustments in any of the three
spatial features can trigger event segmentation, changes in a text-based narrative are more
noticeably marked by changes in time rather than region or motion. The reason for this is
because time is a key factor in enabling speech and text comprehension (language relies on
temporal logic), more so than being able to see shifts in region or movement. These three make

up the hierarchy of event-perception hypotheses, the independence hypothesis, the additive

hypothesis, and the medium-independent hypothesis (Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. & Zwaan, R. A.
(2001). Thus, using the previous findings, we are able to explain how we perceive event-driven
actions and why we do so.

Although Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. & Zwaan, R. A. (2001) describes movement features
as a vital aid in segmenting activity, Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. (2007) reinforces the idea
that movement becomes even more important in segmentation when viewers identify finegrained units depicting activities motivated by a purpose (Zacks, 2004), suggesting that people
depend on external sources of information; one recurring source being the tendency to deduce
actors intentions and goals in order to grasp the bigger spectrum of activity. Another piece of
evidence supporting the goal-driven hypothesis comes from the neuroimaging study of reading
events in texts (Speer, Reynolds, & Zacks,in press).

Just like in previous experiments, event boundaries in the narrative correlated with brief
increases in brain activity that matched in timing and location to those for action films, implying
that both location-shifts and shifts in actors goals have huge impacts on event segmentation.
This is backed up with the results of the experiment conducted in Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. &
Zwaan, R. A. (2001). Findings consistent with the event indexing model show that film-viewing
is a multi-faceted form of perception. Each dimension containing the movie events made
independent contributions to perceptions of situation-based events, but only for time and
movement. Shifts in both of these spatial features were enough to trigger a boundary creation in
the mind of the observer, but a shift in region alone did not suffice.

One reason stems from the fact that often, text-based and film stories require the reader to
maintain an understanding of multiple, concurrent storylines that run parallel, but exist in
different areas. These events that occur in different, isolated areas, often happen in the same
temporal time zone, meaning that shifting between the two zones wouldnt create a perceivable
change in narrative. This is another form of automatic segmentation, where the viewer is able to
distinguish the different actions, yet still connect it all back to the overall plot of the narrative.

If we were to organize all of the factors that affect event segmentation, we would notice
that as we move along the spectrum towards the sensory end, features such as sound, lighting,
and contact between actors and objects are what make up the non-active aspect of the narrative,
which are the things that are processed passively by our sense. Toward the conceptual end are
features such as goals and social conventions, which are meaningful factors that we process
actively, perhaps out of interest in a progressing storyline or a general empathetic link to the
storyline. In the middle are the more technical features such as sequential structure, or the order
in which events tend to occur. Here, the focus of these features is providing the viewer with the
necessary environment to be able to balance the passive and active forms of event segmentation.
All of these different types of features are present in the process of perceiving and translating an
event-based experience into the mind, and this spectrums shows that peoples tendency to
segment events derives from a large mix of features that come from the brains ability to create
hierarchical constructs of events.

In reviewing the two papers, weve been able to understand this phenomenon of event
segmentation in more detail. To conclude our findings, we will establish two different concepts
that both hold a place in cognitive neuroscience and that make up event segmentation theory.

One concept is that peoples seemingly unified perception of what is happening now is actually
conjured from a set of memorial representations which are maintained by active neural
processing. Collectively, these representations are known as the working memory, and they are
characterized by a limited capacity and duration (Baddeley, 2003). The other concept is that
comprehension is predictive, encompassing a vast range from vision to language to learning.
These findings suggest that we process the present in part by predicting the near future, which is
hugely significant because it lets us respond to external stimuli in due time. Both of these
concepts cast a different light on event segmentation, but in the end, this shows that the chunking
of experience into separate events enables people to carry out their lives in a continuous and
logical manner.
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Magliano, J. P., Miller, J. & Zwaan, R. A. (2001)

Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. (2007)