BEHAVIORAL AND NEUROIMAGING STUDIES OF EVENT PERCEPTION
Jeff Zacks

How do we represent what is happening around us?  I will argue that we
apply hierarchically structured representations to encode, remember, and
talk about events.  A behavioral investigation of on-line event perception
demonstrated clear evidence of hierarchical structure in event perception,
which influenced both behavioral and linguistic measures. Functional
neuroimaging studies suggest that event segmentation is an ongoing
component of perception.  New data indicate that both perceptual cues and
attributions of intentions influence how we segment events.  Together,
these results support the view that we automatically and actively encode
events in terms of structured representations, which capture recurring
features of activity such as goals, roles and causal influence.