Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Traditional event cognition research typically characterises events as continuous, each bounded by a single beginning and a single ending. Daily events, however, often seem to involve discontinuities. For instance, if one is in a meeting that is temporarily interrupted by a phone call, one retains two events—the meeting and the phone call—rather than three, which include the meeting before the phone call, the phone call itself, and the meeting subsequent to the call. This study explores what binds events together across these discontinuities in everyday life. We examined five potential binding factors: place, people, topic, activity, and goal. Fifty-one participants provided data on recent non-contiguous daily life events, revealing that 97% of these events were tied by the 'Activity' aspect, followed by the 'Place' aspect (82%) and 'Goal' aspect (56%). 'People' (48%) and 'Topic' aspects (24%) were less significant in unifying non-contiguous events. The proportion of each event aspect in non-contiguous events suggests a need to expand theories of event cognition to focus on what brings events together rather than solely on what separates them—a perspective often overlooked in cognitive event theories.