Event perception

Event perception is a cognitive process responsible for partitioning the continuous flow of conscious experience into discrete, meaningful units called events. It is a form of categorization that binds entities such as objects, actions, or activities to settings, often in an ordered sequence. Events can be organized by multiple factors, such as the causal relations or statistical associations between their components, or by a goal subserved by the set of actions within the event. Abstract event categories, called event schemas, are stored in long term memory and are instantiated in working memory representations of the ongoing event, called event models, which are maintained and updated as perceptual stimuli fluctuate.

Richmond & Zacks (2017) argued that event models enable prediction of the near future with greater accuracy than is possible without an event structure, and are therefore adaptive in allowing the agent to anticipate future states of their environment and plan their actions accordingly. According to Event Segmentation Theory, predictions made by an event model are continuously compared with observed changes in the environment. When an event model's predictions deviate sufficiently from observation, the model is updated to reflect the start of a new event, producing an event boundary. Successive modifications to working event models contribute to an overarching event structure that is preserved in episodic memory. The locations of event boundaries in episodic memory produce systematic distortions in memory, such as time dilation and ordering effects.