Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a connectionist model of event knowledge that istrained on examples of sequences of activities that are notexplicitly labeled as events. The model learns co-occurrencepatterns among the components of activities as they occur inthe moment (entities, actions, and contexts), and also learns topredict sequential patterns of activities. In so doing, the modeldisplays behaviors that in humans have been characterized asexemplifying inferencing of unmentioned event components,the prediction of upcoming components (which may or maynot ever happen or be mentioned), reconstructive memory,and the ability to flexibly accommodate novel variations frompreviously encountered experiences. All of these behaviorsemerge from what the model learns.