Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action

Mental representations of everyday experience are rich, structured, and multimodal. In this article we consider the adaptive pressures that led to human construction of such representations, arguing that structured event representations enable cognitive systems to more effectively predict the trajectory of naturalistic everyday activity. We propose an account of how cortical systems and the hippocampus (HPC) interact to construct, maintain, and update event representations. This analysis throws light on recent research on story comprehension, event segmentation, episodic memory, and action planning. It also suggests how the growing science base can be deployed to diagnose impairments in event perception and memory, and to improve memory for everyday events. Advanced neuroimaging methods and naturalistic stimuli are being used to characterize event representations in extended activities. Behavioral studies are beginning to characterize event segmentation in interactive, first-person experiences. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies are characterizing the role of event model updating in working memory access. Studies of special populations and individual differences are characterizing how event models develop over the lifespan, vary across individuals, and are impaired by disease and injury. Neuroimaging studies are beginning to characterize interactions between the HPC, subcortical structures, and the cortex in binding features into events.