Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fluent event processing involves segmenting streaming sensory information into discrete units. Adults and childrenselectively attend to these meaningful moments within event streams, which predicts later memory. In natural environments,however, uninterrupted attention is unlikely. Consequently, some information is missed, including event boundary information.To what extent does missing information alter the attentional dynamics of processing, specifically viewers’ ability to targetremaining boundaries with enhanced attention? Adults advanced at their own pace through slideshows of unfolding activity.Slides were systematically deleted to enable comparison of viewers’ attentional dynamics when specific content was presentversus absent. Average dwelling per slide increased with missing content. However, the attentional dynamics of processingwere unaltered; attention to boundaries displayed comparable enhancement regardless of missing content. Attention modulationduring processing of relatively familiar events appears to be highly robust to missing information. What occurs with more novelevents is an interesting question for future research.