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Filmmakers use continuity editing to engender a sense of situational continuity or discontinuity at editing boundaries. The goal of this study was to assess the impact of continuity editing on how people perceive the structure of events in a narrative film and to identify brain networks that are associated with the processing of different types of continuity editing boundaries. Participants viewed a commercially produced film and segmented it into meaningful events while brain activity was recorded with functional MRI. We identified three degrees of continuity that can occur at editing locations: edits that are continuous in space, time, and action; edits that are discontinuous in space or time but continuous in action; and edits that are discontinuous in action as well as space or time. Discontinuities in action had the biggest impact on behavioral event segmentation and discontinuities in space and time had minor effects. Edits were associated with large transient increases in early visual areas. Spatial-temporal changes and action changes produced strikingly different patterns of transient change, and provided evidence that specialized mechanisms in higher-order perceptual processing regions are engaged to maintain continuity of action in the face of spatiotemporal discontinuities. These results suggest that commercial film editing is shaped to support the comprehension of meaningful events that bridge breaks in low-level visual continuity, and even breaks in continuity of spatial and temporal location.

We investigated the extent to which understanders monitor shifts in time and space during ®lm comprehension. Participants viewed a feature-length ®lm and identi®ed those points in the ®lm in which they perceived a change in situation. We performed an a priori analysis of the ®lms to identify the shifts in time, the movement of characters, and region. The relationship between the theoretical analysis of the ®lms and the participants judgements of situational change was assessed. The results provide support for the Event Indexing Model and suggest that situation models for ®lmed events are indexed along multiple dimensions of situational continuity. Furthermore, the pattern of results was similar for narrative ®lm as they are for narrative text. This ®nding suggest that there are general mechanisms for event understanding that operate independently of medium or mode of experience.It has long been assumed that stories conveyed through discourse represent much more than what is explicitly provided in a text. Rather, they convey a complex set of events that bear some resemblance to real-world events. In particular, narrative events occur within a particular time, place, and are causally connected. Situation models can capture the people, spatial and temporal settings, the goal plans and actions, and event sequences that are depicted in a story. In the present study, we tested a particular model of discourse understanding, namely the Event Indexing (EI) Model (Zwaan et al., 1995a;, in a non-text domain, speci®cally ®lm understanding. Narrative ®lms may more closely resemble everyday experiences than do narrative texts, given the perceptual and analogue nature of ®lmed events. As such, the present study may provide a test of the extent to which the EI model can account for event understanding in general.Theories of situation model construction assume that coherent models are indexed along multiple dimensions of situational continuity Magliano et al., 1998;Zwaan et al., 1995a;). The EI model (Zwaan et al., 1995a; assumes that the online monitoring of situational continuity is a central process in model construction. As each story event and action is comprehended, understanders monitor changes in continuity in entities, time, space, causality, and intentionality. This indexing provides a basis for monitoring coherence because it enables an understander to determine how incoming information is related to the prior context. To the extent that a current event shares an index on a particular dimension with an event that is currently in working memory, a link will be formed between them, via the index. If no link can be established, a new index will be formed on that dimension.

This study addresses 3 questions: How flexible are readers when reading strategically? How is strategic processing affected by properties of the text? and Do some strategies lead to better text retention than others? Participants read short narratives and thought aloud with an instruction to either explain, predict, associate, or understand. The think-aloud protocols were used to predict sentence reading times for other participants who read silently with the same strategies. The results indicated that readers are capable of strategically controlling the inferences that they generate. However, strategic control comes at some cost in that it limits the resources devoted to other inferences. Furthermore, strategic processing is heavily constrained by a text. Text-based explanations occurred when there was an identifiable causal antecedent in the prior text. Knowledge-based inferences occurred when there were no antecedents and when new characters and objects were introduced. These effects occurred across reading strategies. Reading to explain led to better memory, but only when reading silently.

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