Large scale event segmentation affects the microlevel action control processes.

Abstract

How do we make sense of our surroundings? A widely recognized field in cognitive psychology suggests that many important functions like memory of incidents, reasoning, and attention depend on the way we segment the ongoing stream of perception (Zacks & Swallow, 2007). An open question still is, how the structure generated from a perceptual stream translates into behavior. To address this question, we combined the findings in event segmentation literature with another influential body of literature that analyzes mechanisms behind the control of individual actions (Frings et al., 2020). Specifically, we analyzed how two very basic mechanisms in action control (binding and retrieval) are affected by boundaries between events. Two comic scenarios with different characters were used to implement events and boundaries between events. In two experiments, we measured binding and retrieval between individually executed responses that could be part of the same or separate events. In Experiment 1, we found larger binding effects for responses that were integrated within an event than for responses that had to be integrated across an event boundary. In Experiment 2, we found that the effect of retrieval of a past response on further actions was hampered by an event boundary. Together, the experiments indicate that the structure we pick up from our environment can translate into ongoing action via modulation of the two basic mechanisms binding and retrieval. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).