Not much is known about event apprehension, the earliest stage of information processing in elicited language production studies, using pictorial stimuli. A reason for our lack of knowledge on this process is that apprehension happens very rapidly (<350 ms after stimulus onset, Griffin & Bock 2000), making it difficult to measure the process directly. To broaden our understanding of apprehension, we analyzed landing positions and onset latencies of first fixations on visual stimuli (pictures of real-world events) given short stimulus presentation times, presupposing that the first fixation directly results from information processing during apprehension.

Situation models are known to help structure our experiences in our memory. But what are the ingredients of a situation model and to what degree do abstract event features contribute to updating of situation models? We manipulated abstract event feature dimensions and narrative specific factors in an experiment in which participants actively constructed a narrative from a random order of event descriptions. We investigated the influence of abstract factors (“degree of feature-change”, “event position”) on response speeding during a subsequent oddball task. Participants were faster for oddballs with a different degree of feature change, which interacted with whether the oddball was from within the same story or from another story. When looking at other-story-oddballs only, we found an interaction between position within the event structure and degree of feature change. Our results suggest that people use abstractions of event features which are important for the instantiation of a situation model.

Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them – they spontaneously and rapidly segment and organize their dynamic experience into coherent event construals. Such event construals may offer a starting point for assembling a linguistic description of the event during speaking (Levelt, 1989). However, the precise format of event representations and their mapping to language have remained elusive, partly because research on how people mentally segment and perceive events (see Radvansky & Zacks, 2014 for a review) has largely proceeded separately from analyses of how events are encoded in language (see Truswell, 2019 for a review).