Experiences are stored in the mind as discrete mental units, or ‘events,’ which influence—and are influenced by—attention, learning, and memory. In this way, the notion of an ‘event’ is foundational to cognitive science. However, despite tremendous progress in understanding the behavioral and neural signatures of events, there is no agreed-upon definition of an event. Here, we discuss different theoretical frameworks of event perception and memory, noting what they can and cannot account for in the literature. We highlight key aspects of events that we believe should be accounted for in theories of event processing — in particular, we argue that the structure and substance of events should be better reflected in our theories and paradigms. Finally, we discuss empirical gaps in the event cognition literature and what the future of event cognition research may look like.

This work is published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Weeks are divided into weekdays and weekends; years into semesters and seasons; lives into stages like childhood, adulthood, and adolescence. How does the structure of experience shape memory? Though much work has examined event representation in human cognition, little work has explored event representation at the scale of ordinary experience. Here, we use shared experiences — in the form of popular television shows — to explore how memories are shaped by event structure at a large scale. We find that memories for events in these shows exhibit several hallmarks of event cognition. Namely, we find that memories are organized with respect to their event structure (boundaries), and that beginnings and endings are better remembered at multiple levels of the event hierarchy simultaneously. These patterns seem to be partially, but not fully, explained by the perceived story-relevance of events. Lastly, using a longitudinal design, we also show how event representations evolve over periods of several months. These results offer an understanding of event cognition at the scale of ordinary human lives.

This work is published in Cogniton.

Our lives are busy: We are constantly bombarded by endless streams of information, worrisome headlines, and never-ending lists of to-dos. In all that chaos, how do we remember when things occurred? In this work, we explore one possible answer to this question. In that process, we document a robust illusion of time that we experience every day of our lives.

This work is currently under review.