Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How the mind represents event knowledge, a persons knowledge of events and situations in the world, is the subject ofcompeting theories. Proposals range from an event being represented as a linear order of activities, to a hierarchical struc-ture of scenes of related activities, or in a more fluid computational framework. Additionally, atypical event knowledgeis thought to correlate with Autism Spectrum Disorder. 140 participants (20 per event) ordered normed activity lists for80 events (e.g., taking money out of an ATM, going to a professional baseball game, baking a cake). Network analysessuggest that the temporal structure of events is rich, not strictly linear, and varies across individuals. Furthermore, wecomputed a consensus ordering for each event from participants activity sequences. We calculated deviations from thatordering for each participant, and correlated deviations with a battery of trait inventories to further investigate differencesamong individuals representations of event structure.