Project Details
Projekt
From Event Models to Event Schemata: Modal and Amodal Event Representations and the Role of Meta-Cognition for Dynamic Event Comprehension
Applicants
Professor Dr. Markus Huff; Dr. Nadia Said
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381713393
Humans process dynamic and transient information quite effortlessly in their daily lives. For example, they integrate spatial and temporal dynamic information in road traffic or team sports and act appropriately. Event perception and cognition theories generally assume that dynamic event processing is based on a mental representation of the observation and that the continuous stream of sensory information is segmented into meaningful segments at points of change. An important consideration in current theories of event cognition is that initial sensory information is stored in schematic, abstract mental representations of the activity and that these abstract representations, in turn, guide encoding and anticipation of future states of the event. The proposed work packages will (1) study how sensory and perceptual information is abstracted to amodal event representations; (2) use methods from metacognition research to study if and how the event structure modulates modal and amodal information. Work package (3) addresses the limitation of current theories of event cognition: they focus mainly on dynamic scenes of naturalistic actions humans have often encountered, such as preparing breakfast or cleaning a room. As a result, it is difficult to describe how event cognition works without an already existing amodal representation of the action. Work package (3) thus studies how event schemata are built up and how they influence event processing.
DFG Programme
Research Units
