Age differences in the perception of hierarchical structure in events

Kurby, Christopher A.; Zacks, Jeffrey M.

doi:10.3758/s13421-010-0027-2

Cited by 130 publications

(231 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(111 reference statements)

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“…Segmentation agreement is a measure of the similarity between each participant's segmentation and the segmentation of the group as a whole, and it was calculated using the methods provided in Kurby and Zacks [16]. First, time in each of the movies was divided into one-second bins.…”

Section: Event Segmentation and Event Memory Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Posttraumatic Stress and the Comprehension of Everyday Activity

2016

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Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disabling disorder with a lifetime prevalence of 6.8% in the United States [1]. Symptoms of PTSD include reexperiencing (e.g., flashbacks), avoidance and numbing (e.g., avoidance of thoughts or places related to the trauma), and increased arousal (e.g., hypervigilance; [2]). People with PTSD also often report impairments in attention and memory on tasks that are not directly related to their traumatic event, such as difficulty remembering a phone number or following a conversation. These symptoms can severely interfere with daily functioning, often limiting a person's ability to work, raise a family, and participate in other activities of daily life [3]. However, we know of no research on how people with symptoms of PTSD comprehend and remember everyday events. The present study therefore asked whether PTSD symptom severity is negatively associated with comprehension and memory of ongoing, naturalistic activity.Hypervigilance, one of the symptoms of increased arousal, may have a particular influence on the way people perceive ongoing activity during everyday life. Hypervigilance results in a state of alertness focused on identifying potentially threatening stimuli [3]. Though hypervigilance can be extremely disruptive for people with PTSD, it is maintained because people with PTSD believe constant alertness will prevent them from experiencing future traumatic events [4]. This may be a normal and adaptive response immediately after a traumatic experience, when threats may still linger [5]; however, when constant alertness continues long after the trauma, as it does in PTSD, it likely adversely impacts people's perception of non-threatening information. For example, the loud noise of a door closing might trigger a combat veteran to take cover because the door's sound is similar to the sound of a bomb exploding. This type of reaction could severely impact the way people perceive, comprehend, and remember ongoing activity, even activity unrelated to their traumatic event.Though people with PTSD may be hyper-attentive to components of the environment that are reminiscent of their traumatic event, this likely comes at a cost to their ability to pay attention to other features of the environment. In fact, there has been some research suggesting that symptoms of PTSD affect the processing of non-trauma related information, though these studies have not included ongoing, naturalistic stimuli. Many of these studies examined event-related potentials (ERPs), including the P300 response (associated with an enhancement of attention to stimuli; see [6] for a review of the P300), to determine how PTSD symptoms affect responses to unexpected auditory tones, words, and pictures. For example, in a meta-analysis of ERP studies in people with PTSD, Karl, Malta, and Maercker [7] found evidence suggesting that people with PTSD displayed reduced arousal in response to neutral information (reduced P300 response) but increased arousal in response to both is the segmentation of ongoing activity i...

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Section: Event Segmentation and Event Memory Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Posttraumatic Stress and the Comprehension of Everyday Activity

2016

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“…Movies of everyday activities were selected from a previous study of event perception in younger and older adults (Kurby & Zacks, 2011). The five activities used were washing a car (432 sec), building a LEGO model (247 sec), putting up a tent (378 sec), washing clothes (300 sec), and planting a window box (354 sec).…”

Section: Materials and Stimulus Presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prediction Error Associated with the Perceptual Segmentation of Naturalistic Events

Zacks¹,

Kurby

Eisenberg³

et al. 2011

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Zacks, Jeffrey M.; Kurby, Christopher A.; Eisenberg, Michelle L.; and Haroutunian, Nayiri, ,"Prediction error associated with the perceptual segmentation of naturalistic events." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.23,12. 4057-4066. (2011 where prediction was more difficult corresponded with subjective boundaries in the stream of experience. At points of unpredictability, midbrain and striatal regions associated with the phasic release of the neurotransmitter dopamine transiently increased in activity. This activity could provide a global updating signal, cuing other brain systems that a significant new event has begun. ■

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“…For example, Zacks, Speer, Vettel, and Jacoby (2006) found that older adults segmented ongoing activities less consistently than younger adults, and this predicted older adults' poorer memory for event details. In addition, Kurby and Zacks (2011) found that older adults' segmentation was less hierarchically organized than younger adults, older adults had worse memory than younger adults, and age differences in event segmentation sometimes predicted these memory differences. Given that the ability to segment events depends on one's sensitivity to changes, these findings suggest that older adults may be less sensitive to changes in ongoing activities.…”

Section: Adult Age Differences In Event Perception and Memory For Changementioning

confidence: 97%

“…http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/201939 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 12, 2017; CHANGE COMPREHENSION 14 Benjamin, 2000) and to perceive and remember structure in ongoing events (Kurby & Zacks, 2011;Zacks et al, 2006). These deficits should lead to impaired encoding of event features, which would reduce older adults' ability to detect change.…”

Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Peer-reviewed) Is the mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Older adults experience deficits in attention and episodic memory (for reviews, see Balota et al, 2000;Zacks et al, 2000) that affect their . 12, 2017; CHANGE COMPREHENSION 12 ability to bind event features (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, 2000) and perceive structure in ongoing activities (Kurby & Zacks, 2011;Zacks et al, 2006). According to CCT, these deficits should lead to poorer encoding of discrete event representations.…”

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Memory Guides the Comprehension of Event Changes for Older and Younger Adults

Wahlheim

Zacks

2017

Preprint

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Two experiments examined adult age differences in the use of memory to comprehend changes in everyday activities. Participants viewed movies depicting an actor performing activities on two fictive days in her life. Some activities were repeated across days, other activities were repeated with a changed feature (e.g., waking up to an alarm clock or a phone alarm), and a final set of activities was performed on Day 2 only. After a one-week delay, participants completed a cued recall test for the activities of Day 2. Unsurprisingly, exact repetition boosted final recall.More surprising, features that changed from Day 1 to Day 2 were remembered approximately as well as features that were only presented on Day 2-showing an absence of proactive interference and in some cases proactive facilitation. Proactive facilitation was strongly related to participants' ability to detect and recollect the changes. Younger adults detected and recollected more changes than older adults, which in part explained older adults' differential deficit in memory for changed activity features. We propose that this pattern may reflect observers' use of episodic memory to make predictions during the experience of a new activity, and that when predictions fail, this triggers processing that benefits subsequent episodic memory.Disruption of this chain of processing could play a role in age-related episodic memory deficits.Keywords: Change Detection, Episodic Memory, Event Perception, Prediction Error, Reminding . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/201939 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 12, 2017; CHANGE COMPREHENSION 3 Memory Guides the Comprehension of Event Changes for Older and Younger AdultsMany of the activities people experience are not brand new, and not completely novel, but are near repetitions-variations on a theme. For example, suppose you had a friend who always ordered a cheeseburger for dinner, but then discovered a family history of heart disease.When you next have dinner with this friend, you might predict that she would place her regular order, but then experience a prediction error if she ordered a salad. Registering this change, consciously or not, would help you to better predict her behavior the next time you eat together.The processing associated with registering the change might also affect your encoding of this particular episode. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that proposes a mechanism by which people use memory for recent past events to guide their comprehension and encoding of the present, with consequences for subsequent memory. This framework is based on previous studies of memory for change and previous research on event comprehension. It leads to predictions about how memory for changes in events is affected by aging, which we tested in two experiments. Before describing the framework and the present experiments, we descri...

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Age differences in the perception of hierarchical structure in events

Cited by 130 publications

References 61 publications

Posttraumatic Stress and the Comprehension of Everyday Activity

Posttraumatic Stress and the Comprehension of Everyday Activity

Prediction Error Associated with the Perceptual Segmentation of Naturalistic Events

Memory Guides the Comprehension of Event Changes for Older and Younger Adults

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