Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Event segmentation divides continuous experience into meaningful events and guides attention, memory, and learning.Culture could impact event segmentation by emphasizing the importance of different aspects of experiences (attentionalfocus), and by providing different exemplars of everyday activities (familiarity). In this study, Indian and US viewers iden-tified large (coarse) and small (fine) events in videos of everyday activities recorded in Indian and US settings. Analysesrevealed that US viewers segmented the activities at a higher rate than Indian viewers. In addition, while the boundariesidentified by US viewers were more strongly associated with visual change, boundaries identified by Indian viewers weremore strongly associated with changes in actions and goals. However, there was no evidence that familiarity with an activ-ity, as indicated by the match between a viewers culture and the activity setting, impacted segmentation. Culture appearsto affect how people define events during perception, independent of familiarity.