Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human activity generates dynamic, multi-modal sensorystreams. Effectively processing this complex flow ofinformation on-the-fly is essential if one is to remember andrespond to others’ action, anticipate what they might do next,and learn how to perform new actions. Selectively attending toinformation-rich regions of activity seems key to fluentprocessing. However, what counts as information-rich likelydepends on numerous factors including relevance to the causalstructure of the activity, local opportunity for repeated viewing,and processing goals of the observer. We explored theinfluence of these factors on observers’ attention to a dynamic,novel activity sequence. A performance context elicitednuanced differences in processing in contrast to a remembercontext. Specifically, individuals given a perform contexttuned in to causally distinct regions of the action stream andfine-level event details. These findings provide altogether newinformation regarding how processing rapidly reorganizesaround novel activity and responds to the processing task athand.