Event Organization Within and Beyond Event Files

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Mayr
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393269228

The Binding-and-Retrieval-in-Action-Control framework (BRAC, Frings et al., 2020) systematizes processes that influence the integration and retrieval of transient stimulus-response (S-R) episodes (i.e., event files). In the first funding phase, we analyzed the role of external context in S-R binding and retrieval. We showed that sharing a context (i.e., a background tone) as compared with being separated by different contexts can strengthen S-R binding. This finding indicates the power of context to temporally structure event files and has a close resemblance to the event segmentation framework (Zacks et al., 2007), which assumes that humans segment their everyday experiences into events. Segmentation of events (e.g., by means of external context) is described as a side effect of an adaptive mechanism that integrates the recent past to predict the near future. It is further assumed that each event has a hierarchical structure. The second funding phase aims at deepening our understanding of how event files are organized and thereby relates our insights on event file binding and segmentation with the knowledge about factors in event cognition that have been shown to govern the hierarchical organization of events.The project pursues three objectives:(1) The role of external context in the BRAC framework will be specified by analyzing electrophysiological correlates of binding and retrieval under varying context conditions. Investigating processing differences during the prime, the prime-probe interval, and the probe will reveal the level(s) at which segmentation by context influences the core processes described in the BRAC framework.(2) We will investigate further event organization factors — that is, spatial location and time — and their segmenting role within and beyond event files. The integration of an event file might be impaired when its elements (stimulus, response) are segmented by e.g.,temporal distance, resulting in smaller after-effects of binding. Moreover, the organization of larger events (such as prime-probe sequences) might be facilitated via a common location. We also try to extend the list of possible organization factors by testing whether the boundary of an event (e.g., its beginning) can influence the organization of simultaneously occurring events.(3) Organization factors will be employed to test whether findings from the spatial negative priming (NP) task can be explained within the BRAC framework. So far, no evidence of event-file binding in auditory spatial NP has been found. We test the notion that the spatial separation of target and distractor in the prime display creates two separate events with the response being exclusively bound with the target. Therefore, the subsequent repetition of the prime distractor location does not retrieve the prime response. To test this assumption, perceptual grouping of prime target and distractor will be employed to overcome the spatial segmentation.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2790: Binding and Retrieval in Action Control
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Christian Beste; Professor Dr. Iring Koch; Dr. Malte Möller