The Neurophysiology of Event Processing in Language and Visual Events

Abstract

Events are a fundamental part of all actions that we undertake, discuss, and view. This chapter reviews the growing cognitive neuroscience literature exploring the structure and processing of tacit event knowledge. Overall, this work implies an ongoing process of building up semantic associations relative to their preceding context, which are constrained by active prediction of upcoming content. In turn, reanalysis mechanisms are initiated when the overall structure of the event is violated and/or does not conform to predictions set up by the context. Event cognition thus emerges from a network of conceptual information links with event-specific selectional restrictions and hierarchical organization. Altogether, this literature suggests that the brain uses overlapping mechanisms of comprehension to rapidly process events in both language and visual events.