Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to perceive and understand experience is influenced by a process that divides it into meaningful parts.This process, called event segmentation, is frequently studied by asking participants to identify meaningful units of activity infilms that depict it from a third person perspective. However, because segmentation is associated with changes in the perceptualand conceptual features of film, it could differ for films that present the same activity from a first person perspective. This studytherefore examined segmentation for simultaneously recorded films that depicted identical activities from different perspectives.In several experiments participants were asked to segment these movies into natural and meaningful units of activity. Measuresof segmentation frequency and agreement provided little evidence that segmentation reliably differed across first and thirdperson perspectives. These preliminary findings suggest that participants identify similar events when they are viewed fromdifferent perspectives.