Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations
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Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations Jonathan F. Kominsky 1 & Lewis Baker 2 & Frank C. Keil 3 & Brent Strickland 4,5 Accepted: 17 September 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Imagine you see a video of someone pulling back their leg to kick a soccer ball, and then a soccer ball soaring toward a goal. You would likely infer that these scenes are two parts of the same event, and this inference would likely cause you to remember having seen the moment the person kicked the soccer ball, even if that information was never actually presented (Strickland & Keil, 2011, Cognition, 121[3], 409–415). What cues trigger people to "fill in" causal events from incomplete information? Is it due to the experience they have had with soccer balls being kicked toward goals? Is it the visual similarity of the object in both halves of the video? Or is it the mere spatiotemporal continuity of the event? In three experiments, we tested these different potential mechanisms underlying the "filling-in" effect. Experiment 1 showed that filling in occurs equally in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, indicating that familiarity with specific event schemas is unnecessary to trigger false memory. Experiment 2 showed that the visible continuation of a launched object’s trajectory is all that is required to trigger filling in, regardless of other occurrences in the second half of the scene. Finally, Experiment 3 found that, using naturalistic videos, this filling-in effect is more heavily affected if the object’s trajectory is discontinuous in space/time compared with if the object undergoes a noticeable transformation. Together, these findings indicate that the spontaneous formation of causal event representations is driven by object representation systems that prioritize spatiotemporal information over other object features. Keywords False memory . Perception . Event representation
Processing scenes and events in real time requires a balance between accuracy and speed. We extract useful bits of information quickly and reliably, but limited processing resources make it impossible to attend to all available information in a timely fashion. A primary strategy for dealing with this Jonathan F. Kominsky and Lewis Baker contributed equally to this work. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01102-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jonathan F. Kominsky [email protected] * Brent Strickland [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, 101 Warren St. Rm. 301, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
2
Pymetrics, Inc., New York, NY, USA
3
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
4
Ecole Normale Superieure & Institut Jean Nicod, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
5
School of Collective Intelligence, UM6P, Ben Guerir, Morocco
problem is to employ specialized perceptual and inferential mechanisms that serve to prioritize certain types of information to the detriment of others. In chan
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