Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People automatically segment online perceptual and conceptual experiences into events (Newston, 1973). A newmodel-based theory explains how people construct temporal markers and prioritize those changes to build representations ofevents (Khemlani et al., 2015). The theory is implemented within an embodied extension of the ACT-R cognitive architecture(Anderson, 2007) called ACT-R/E (Trafton et al., 2013). Its principal parameter is the prioritization scheme by which certaindetectable changes (e.g., in a perceived location) are preferred over others (e.g., in perceived states of an object). We tested thepredictions of the theory and its computational model against an experiment on narrative event segmentation. Participants in thestudy read an excerpt of text and were asked to assess whether certain lines marked the start of a new event. The computationalmodel readily accounted for their segmentation behavior. We conclude by discussing event segmentation and its relation toembodied cognition and cognitive robotics.