Similarities in Object and Event Segmentation: A Geometric Approach to Event Path Segmentation

Events and objects are similar cognitive entities

Logico-semantic theories have long noted parallels between the linguistic representation of temporal entities (events) and spatial entities (objects): bounded (or telic) predicates such as fix a car resemble count nouns such as sandcastle because they are "atoms" that have well-defined boundaries, contain discrete minimal parts and cannot be divided arbitrarily. By contrast, unbounded (or atelic) phrases such as drive a car resemble mass nouns such as sand in that they are unspecified for atomic features. Here, we demonstrate for the first time the parallels in the perceptual-cognitive representation of events and objects even in entirely non-linguistic tasks. Specifically, after viewers form categories of bounded or unbounded events, they can extend the category to objects or substances respectively (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, in a training study, people successfully learn event-to-object mappings that respect atomicity (i.e., grouping bounded events with objects and unbounded events with substances) but fail to acquire the opposite, atomicity-violating mappings (Experiment 3). Finally, viewers can spontaneously draw connections between events and objects without any prior training (Experiment 4). These striking similarities between the mental representation of events and objects have implications for current theories of event cognition, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Cognitive Evaluation of Spatial Formalisms

The authors present four human behavioral experiments to address the question of intuitive granularities in fundamental spatial relations as they can be found in formal spatial calculi. These calculi focus on invariant characteristics under certain (especially topological) transformations. Of particular interest to this article is the concept of two spatially extended entities overlapping each other. The overlap concept has been extensively treated in Galton's mode of overlap calculus (Galton, 1998). In the first two experiments, the authors used a category construction task to calibrate this calculus against behavioral data and found that participants adopted a very coarse view on the concept of overlap and distinguished only between three general relations: proper part, overlap, and non-overlap. In the following two experiments, the authors changed the instructions to explicitly address the possibility that humans could be swayed to adopt a more detailed level of granularity, that is, the authors encouraged them to create as many meaningful groups as possible. The results show that the three relations identified in the first two experiments (overlap, non-overlap, and proper part) are very robust and a natural level of granularity across all four experiments. However, the results also reveal that contextual factors gain more influence at finer levels of granularity.