Abstract

People construct working event models to comprehend dynamic, multimodal information such as movies and narratives, but how these models update remains debated. Two mechanisms have been proposed: incremental updating, which selectively modifies specific dimensions while preserving others, and global updating, which discards the existing model entirely to construct a new one. This dissertation investigated how event boundaries influence which updating mechanism people employ. Across two experiments, participants read narratives about everyday activities while we measured recognition memory response times and self-paced reading times. Participants also completed event segmentation tasks to identify perceived boundaries. Results revealed a consistent dissociation opposite to the a priori predictions: within ongoing events, updating was global, with dimensional changes producing processing costs even for non-changed dimensions; across event boundaries, updating became incremental, with costs confined to directly relevant dimensions. We propose a hierarchical efficiency account: within events, global updating is adaptive because environmental scaffolding supports reconstruction of discarded information; across boundaries, incremental updating preserves dimensions essential for cross-event coherence when this scaffolding is disrupted. These findings suggest that incremental and global updating are complementary strategies deployed in response to different informational contexts, highlighting the sophisticated flexibility of human event cognition.

Committee Chair

Jeffrey Zacks

Committee Members

Andrew Butler; Ian Dobbins; Jeffrey Zacks; Todd Braver; Zachariah Reagh

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

4-17-2026

Language

English (en)

Download

Included in

Psychology Commons

Share

COinS