Events: They are the stuff of experience, but they aren't what actually happens. What happens is ongoing dynamic, multidimensional, sensory flow, which sentient species such as humans somehow transform into structured, describable, memorable units of experience. What is the nature of the redescription processes that effect this transformation? How do the young of a given sentient species acquire species-relevant event-redescription skills? Are there individual differences in event-redescription fluency? If so, how do such differences affect cognitive and social functioning? For adult humans, rendering the flow of sensation into event descriptions is generally so effortless as to go unnoticed, much of the processing occurring outside consciousness. Recent research suggests that predictability monitoring is a key element of event processing. For example, the experience of bounded events seems to emerge with the detection of “troughs” in sensory predictability. These regions of predictable unpredictability provide articulation points that demarcate one event from another in the representations derived from the actual streaming information. A fluent event processor can predict such troughs and selectively targets them as the sensory stream unfolds. As knowledge of predictability grows within the individual, processing reorganizes over time, such that, increasingly, attention is selectively up-regulated to predictability troughs — aka event boundaries — and down-regulated to predictability plateaus. On this “riding the wave” account, acquisition of event processing fluency depends crucially on predictability monitoring skills, and enhancing predictability should benefit emerging event-processing skill. In this talk, I will present evidence that begins to bear out these suggestions, and then consider where “riding the wave” might take the field next.
['Dare A. Baldwin']
Invited speakers: Riding the Wave: Event processing as predictability monitoring