Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper deals with the decomposition of temporal sequences and the emergence of events. The problematic nature of various definitions of events is first reviewed and an hypothesis - the cut hypothesis - is proposed. The cut hypothesis states that a sequence of stimuli is cut out to become a cognitive entity if it is repeatedly experienced in different contexts. The hypothesis can thus explain the emergence of events on the basis of former experience. Two experiments were conducted to compare the predictions of the cut hypothesis to the predictions of two other explanations, explanation by association and explanation by changes along the sequence of stimuli. The first experiment showed that subjects better recognized a certain secpience after seeing it repeated as a whole than after seeing it as a part of another repeating sequence. The second experiment demonstrated that after experiencing a certain repeating sequence subjects would hardly consider dividing in its midst even though that point was a point of maximal change, as evidenced by divisions