The Importance of Events Overview of past theories related to the - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Importance of Events

Overview of past theories related to the event recognition

Definition of Event

• Events are what happens to us, what we do, what we

anticipate with pleasure or dread, and what we remember with fondness or regret

• More precisely: “a segment of time at a given location that is

conceived by an observer to have a beginning and an end”

Long Past, Short History

• Event cognition has “a long past but a short history”
• “memory” usually denotes what you get when you call to

mind a previously experienced event.

Integrated Conscious Experience

• Our minds and brains process information from an imposing

number of sources.

Kant

• Kant believed that key aspects of our mental representations
• f events are determined by some innate categories.
• Time
• Space
• Causality (How events are related to each other)

Gestalt psychology – 3 ideas

(1) Psychological theory must deal with wholes or molar units

• perating at a macroscopic level of functioning

Gestalt psychology – 3 ideas

(2) Theories of qualitative differences can be eminently quantitative

Gestalt psychology – 3 ideas

(3) Cognition depends on representations that are functionally isomorphic to their parts.

Neobehaviorism (Tolman)

• Molar behaviors are an important and appropriate level of

analysis(similar to the first idea of gestalt psychology).

• Cognitive map(rat’s maze experiment): they were built up a

mental representation of the entire environment to which they could refer when presented with various navigational challenges.

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

• We propose a central structure called an event model that is

an integrated episodic representation of a particular event.

Situation Semantics

• The basic components of an event are individuals, the

relations among individuals, individuals’ properties, event states, and spatiotemporal locations

• Situation semantics proposes that events consist of entities

that have features

Situation Semantics

• A state-of-affairs is a static configuration of entities and

features that is localized in time and space.

• A course-of-events is a sequence of states-of-affairs that

unfolds over time and is held together by some common attribute.

Embodied Cognition

• The embodied cognition hypothesis is that our bodies

influence how we think.

Embodied Cognition- M. Wilson’s Idea

• Cognition is situated.
• Cognition is time-pressured.
• Cognitive work can be offloaded onto the environment.
• Environment is part of the cognitive system.
• Cognition is for action.
• Offline cognition is body based.

Cognitive Neuroscience

• This suggests that there are specialized neural mechanisms

that represent knowledge about how particular events typically unfold. (Ex: Patient who can do individual actions but can’t sequence actions to a coherent larger event as preparing instant coffee)

Mental Models

• Mental models are mental representations that act as

isomorphs in simulating the structure of the world.

• Principle 2 (Finitism). “A mental model must be finite in size

and cannot directly represent an infinite domain.”

• Principle 3 (Constructivism). “A mental model is constructed

from tokens arranged in a particular structure to represent a state of affairs.”

Mental Models

• Principle 4 (Economy). “A description of a single state of

affairs is represented by a single mental model even if the description is incomplete or indeterminate.”

• Principle 9 (Structural identity). “The structures of mental

models are identical to the structures of those states of affairs, whether perceived or conceived, that the models represent.”