Abstract
Social event segmentation, or parsing the ongoing dynamic content into discrete social events, is thought to represent an underlying mechanism that supports the expert human ability to navigate complex social environments quickly and seamlessly. Here we examined whether social event segmentation is influenced by the appropriate social context. To do so, we created two video clips, one in which several events unfolded in a contextually consistent manner (Contextual condition), and the other, in which the order of these events was scrambled using a random sequence (Non-contextual condition). Participants viewed each clip and were asked to mark social and non-social events. Results demonstrated that the same information was identified as constituting event breakpoints within each contextual and non-contextual clip. However, increased group response agreement for social relative to non-social event boundaries was observed in the Contextual relative to the Non-contextual condition. Thus, while perceptual information appears to underlie the identification of social and non-social events, contextual information acts to reduce the uncertainty regarding event boundaries, specifically while parsing social information.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018