A goal bias in action: The boundaries adults perceive in events align with sites of actor intent.

Abstract

We live in a dynamic world comprised of continuous events. Remembering our past and predicting future events, however, requires that we segment these ongoing streams of information in a consistent manner. How is this segmentation achieved? This research examines whether the boundaries adults perceive in events, such as the Olympic figure skating routine used in these studies, align with the beginnings (sources) and endings (goals) of human goal-directed actions. Study 1 showed that a group of experts, given an explicit task with unlimited time to rewatch the event, identified the same subevents as one another, but with greater agreement as to the timing of goals than sources. In Study 2, experts, novices familiarized with the figure skating sequence, and unfamiliarized novices performed an online event segmentation task, marking boundaries as the video progressed in real time. The online boundaries of all groups corresponded with the sources and goals offered by Study 1's experts, with greater alignment of goals than sources. Additionally, expertise, but not mere perceptual familiarity, boosted the alignment of sources and goals. Finally, Study 3, which presented novices with the video played in reverse, indicated, unexpectedly, that even when spatiotemporal cues were disrupted, viewers' perceived event boundaries still aligned with their perception of the actors' intended sources and goals. This research extends the goal bias to event segmentation, and suggests that our spontaneous sensitivity toward goals may allow us to transform even relatively complex and unfamiliar event streams into structured and meaningful representations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does semantic knowledge influence event segmentation and recall of text?

“…Moreover, amateur dancers perceived fewer events in the dance phrase less after they were familiarized with it. Likewise, Levine, Hirsh-Pasek, Pace, and Michnick Golinkoff (2017) asked experts and novices to segment an Olympic figure-skating routine and found that experts perceived fewer, longer events.…”

Finding events in a continuous world: A developmental account

“…These findings suggest that movement information has less influence on adults’ segmentation boundary judgments for events involving goal structures than events lacking those higher‐level structures. Further, for a skilled motion event such as figure skating, experts’ segmentations are more sensitive to the goal structure of the event than novices’ segmentations (Levine et al, ; see also Bläsing, ). That is, having more top‐down information about actors’ goals alters adults’ interpretation of low‐level perceptual cues.…”

“…Moreover, given the redundancy between movement features and goal structures in events (Zacks et al, )—particularly for everyday events—one possibility is that infants may initially be sensitive to low‐level event structure (i.e., action regularities, movement features), and may gradually learn about the goal structure of events through the overlap of these structures (Baldwin et al, ). Additionally, infants’ burgeoning understanding of actors’ goals may facilitate infants’ ability to segment events, and infants’ event segmentation may become more sophisticated as their understanding of goal‐directed action matures through event experience, just as expertise in adults leads to greater alignment of segmentation patterns with event goal structure (Levine et al, ). These possibilities are explored as we turn to the evidence for mechanisms of event segmentation in children.…”

“…Events populate our world, and we take for granted that we can find where they begin and end. We take this for granted likely because as adults we are adept at recognizing boundaries in continuous streams of activity that signal meaningful changes, such as changes in actors’ goals (Levine, Hirsh‐Pasek, Pace, & Golinkoff, ; Zacks, Speer, & Reynolds, ; Zacks, Speer, Swallow, & Maley, ). Segmenting events is necessary in order to understand what is happening in the world around us (e.g., what other people are doing and why; Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, ), to remember what has happened (Flores, Bailey, Eisenberg, & Zacks, ; Sargent et al, ; Swallow, Zacks, & Abrams, ; Zacks, Speer, Vettel, & Jacoby, ), and to plan for what will happen next (Bailey, Kurby, Giovannetti, & Zacks, ).…”

Expert Event Segmentation of Dance Is Genre-Specific and Primes Verbal Memory

“…Further, experts segmented the same dance sequence even less after physically embodying, learning, and performing it. Levine and colleagues [ 18 ] replicated these findings among expert figure skaters, and clarified that visual familiarity among novice observers does not replicate the effects of physical expertise.…”