From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning

Research with young children has shown that, like adults, they focus selectively on the aspects of an actor's behavior that are relevant to his or her underlying intentions. The current studies used the visual habituation paradigm to ask whether infants would similarly attend to those aspects of an action that are related to the actor's goals. Infants saw an actor reach for and grasp one of two toys sitting side by side on a curtained stage. After habituation, the positions of the toys were switched and babies saw test events in which there was a change in either the path of motion taken by the actor's arm or the object that was grasped by the actor. In the first study, 9-month-old infants looked longer when the actor grasped a new toy than when she moved through a new path. Nine-month-olds who saw an inanimate object of approximately the same dimensions as the actor's arm touch the toy did not show this pattern in test. In the second study, 5-month-old infants showed similar, though weaker, patterns. A third study provided evidence that the findings for the events involving a person were not due to perceptual changes in the objects caused by occlusion by the hand. A fourth study replicated the 9 month results for a human grasp at 6 months, and revealed that these effects did not emerge when infants saw an inanimate object with digits that moved to grasp the toy. Taken together, these findings indicate that young infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion, and that by 6 months infants encode the actions of other people in ways that are consistent with more mature understandings of goal-directed action.

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in predictions arise, an event boundary is perceived. According to the theory, the perception of events depends on both sensory cues and knowledge structures that represent previously learned information about event parts and inferences about actors' goals and plans. Neurological and neurophysiological data suggest that representations of events may be implemented by structures in the lateral prefrontal cortex and that perceptual prediction error is calculated and evaluated by a processing pathway, including the anterior cingulate cortex and subcortical neuromodulatory systems.