Processing correlates of lexical semantic complexity

This paper explores how verb meanings that differ in semantic complexity are processed and represented. In particular, we compare eventive verbs, which denote causally structured events, with stative verbs, which denote facts without causal structure. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs should take longer to process than stative verbs. Two experiments, a lexical decision task and a self-paced reading study, confirmed this prediction. The findings suggest that (a) semantic complexity is reflected in processing time, (b) processing verb meanings involves activating properties of the event structure beyond participants' roles, and (c) more generally, lexical event structures, which subsume thematic roles, may mediate between syntactic knowledge and semantic interpretation.     

The predictive validity of belief in future occurrence

Prospection is associated, in varying degrees, with a sense that imagined events will (or will not) happen in the future—referred to as belief in future occurrence. The present research investigated to what extent this belief is justified and predicts the actual occurrence of events in the future. In two studies, participants rated their belief in the future occurrence of events imagined to happen in the coming month (Study 1) or week (Study 2), and the actual occurrence of events was then assessed. Results showed that the odds of event occurrence were about 2 times higher with an increase of 1 unit on the belief scale. Belief was particularly pronounced for temporally close events and was largely determined by the congruence of events with autobiographical knowledge. These results suggest that belief in future occurrence has some truth value and may inform decisions and actions.     

Tracking the construction of episodic future thoughts

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures (episodic future thinking) is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns of activation over knowledge structures at different levels of specificity, with general knowledge about the personal future (i.e., personal semantic information and anticipated general events) providing a context or frame for retrieving, integrating, and interpreting episodic details. In line with this hypothesis, Study 1 showed that the construction of episodic future thoughts is frequently a protracted generative process in which general personal knowledge is accessed before episodic details. We then explored in more detail the nature of this general personal knowledge and tested the hypothesis that it is mainly organized in terms of personal goals. Study 2 showed that cuing participants with knowledge about personal goals increased the ease of future event production during a fluency task. Study 3 further demonstrated that cuing participants with their personal goals facilitated access to episodic details during the imagination of future events. Taken together, these findings indicate that general personal knowledge and, in particular, knowledge about personal goals plays an important role in the construction of episodic future thoughts.     

Event understanding and memory in healthy aging and dementia of the Alzheimer type

Segmenting ongoing activity into events is important for later memory of those activities. In the experiments reported in this article, older adults' segmentation of activity into events was less consistent with group norms than younger adults' segmentation, particularly for older adults diagnosed with mild dementia of the Alzheimer type. Among older adults, poor agreement with others' event segmentation was associated with deficits in recognition memory for pictures taken from the activity and memory for the temporal order of events. Impaired semantic knowledge about events also was associated with memory deficits. The data suggest that semantic knowledge about events guides encoding, facilitating later memory. To the extent that such knowledge or the ability to use it is impaired in aging and dementia, memory suffers.     

Children's expectations and episodic reports over 12 weeks: Influences on memory for a specially designed pediatric examination

This investigation extended work on the linkage between knowledge and remembering by exploring the relation between generic and episodic memory representations. Thirty 6-year-old children experienced a mock physical examination with some expected components omitted and other unexpected actions included. Immediately and again after 12 weeks, the children reported the event, answered questions about what usually happens in an examination, and rated their confidence in aspects of their reports. They remembered more typical than atypical present components, that is, those included in the examination, and, over time, falsely reported more typical than atypical actions. The children produced intrusions of expected-but-omitted medical features at the delay but with lower confidence ratings than they provided for correctly recalled items. Performance on a source monitoring task was associated with aspects of the children's confidence ratings for intrusions. The findings provide evidence that the relation between episodic and generic representations is dynamic and suggest that the capacity to differentiate between them contributes to the development of accurate eyewitness memory.     

Placing events in time: The role of autobiographical recollection

Episodic experience is argued to be rich in temporal information, but it remains unclear whether temporal information is directly coded in the event memory or is reconstructed at retrieval. The two experiments reported here emphasise the role of reconstructive processes of autobiographical context in establishing the date of memories. Younger and older participants were presented with famous public events, although only the latter had actually lived through them. Participants were asked to make forced-choice judgements about the date of the event and other event-related facts. Overall, while the older group showed better fact knowledge of the events, this did not translate into better dating performance. This older group showed similar dating performance across events with high and low factual knowledge. In contrast, the younger group's dating accuracy was determined by their level of knowledge. This suggests that older individuals who have direct episodic experience of an event may perform the task in a qualitatively different manner, eschewing semantic facts in favour of other sources of information. Crucially, this process does not appear to enhance performance. A second experiment addressed the issue of whether older participants date events based on general qualities of the event memory (e.g., vividness), the availability of other event-related semantic facts, or autobiographical context. It was found that the ability to place an event in autobiographical context is related to dating accuracy, but not to other aspects of memory.     

A Comparison of Preschoolers' Memory,Knowledge, and Anticipation of Events

This study examined the development of the episodic and semantic memory systems, with an emphasis on the emergence of the two aspects of the former: episodic memory (the ability to re-experience a past event) and episodic future thinking (the ability to pre-experience a future event). Three-, 4-, and 5-year olds were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: past, semantic, or future. Children were asked questions about the same eight events, phrased in past, generalized present, or future tense. Half of these events were ones for which parents rated their children as having a high level of control (or input) over how the event unfolds, whereas the other half were rated as “low control.” Responses were scored with respect to their specificity and accuracy. Results revealed age differences in children's accuracy scores across all three conditions. Children's episodic future thinking and episodic memory, but not semantic memory, were less accurate for low-control events compared with high-control events. These results offer a new perspective on the development of the episodic and semantic memory systems and the methods used to assess them.     

Framing pictures: the role of knowledge in automatized encoding and memory for gist

In general, frame theories are theories about the representation and use of knowledge for pattern recognition. In the present article, the general properties of frame theories are discussed with regard to their implications for psychological processes, and an experiment is presented which tests whether this approach yields viable predictions about the manner in which people comprehend and remember pictures of real-world scenes. Normative ratings were used to construct six target pictures, each of which contained both expected and unexpected objects. Eye movements were then recorded as subjects who anticipated a difficult recognition test viewed the targets for 30 sec each. Then, the subjects were asked to discriminate the target pictures from distractors in which either expected or unexpected objects had been changed. One consequence of the embeddedness of frame systems is that global frames may function as "semantic pattern detectors," so that the perceptual knowledge in them could be used for relatively automatic pattern recognition and comprehension. Thus, subjects might be able to identify expected objects by using automatized encoding procedures that operate on global physical features. In contrast, identification of unexpected objects (i.e., objects not represented in the currently active frame) should generally require more analysis of local visual details. These hypotheses were confirmed with the fixation duration data: First fixations to the unexpected objects were approximately twice as long as first fixations to the expected objects. On the recognition test, subjects generally noticed only the changes that had been made to the unexpected objects, despite the fact that the proportions of correct rejections were made conditional on whether the target objects had been fixated. These data are again consistent with the idea that local visual details of objects represented in the frame are not neccesary for identification and are thus not generally encoded. Further, since subjects usually did not notice when expected objects were deleted or replaced with different expected objects, it was concluded that if two events instantiate the same frame, they may often be indistinguishable, as long as any differences between them are represented as arguments in the frame. Thus, for the most part, the only information about an event that is episodically "tagged" is information which distinguishes that particular event from others of the same general class. The data reinforce the utility of a frame theory approach to perception and memory.     

When the ordinary seems unexpected: evidence for incremental physical knowledge in young infants

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each vector, infants acquire a sequence of variables that enables them to predict outcomes within the vector more and more accurately over time. This account predicts that infants who have acquired only a few of the variables in a sequence should err in two ways in violation-of-expectation tasks: (1) they should view impossible events consistent with their incomplete knowledge as expected (errors of omission), and (2) they should view possible events inconsistent with their incomplete knowledge as unexpected (errors of commission). Many reports have shown that infants who have not yet identified a variable in an event category produce errors of omission: they fail to view impossible events involving the variable as unexpected. However, there has been no report revealing errors of commission in infants' responses to possible events. The present research examined whether 3- and 2.5-month-old infants, whose knowledge of occlusion events is very limited, would produce errors of commission as well as errors of omission when responding to these events. At 3 months of age, infants viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a tall cylinder became visible when passing behind a tall screen with a very large opening extending from its upper edge. At 2.5 months, infants viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a tall cylinder became visible when passing behind a tall screen with a very large opening extending from its lower edge. These findings provide a new kind of evidence for the incremental-knowledge account, and more generally for the notion that infants, like older children and adults, engage in rule-based reasoning about physical events.