Knowing Your World: Event Cognition

This article responds to Hans Kippenberg's, Willem Drees's, and Ann Taves's commentaries on my book, The Problem of Disenchantment. It presents an overview of the key arguments of the book, clarifies its use of Problemgeschichte to reconceptualize Weber's notion of disenchantment, and discusses issues in the history and philosophy of science and religion. Finally, it elaborates on the use of recent cognitive theory in intellectual history. In particular, it argues that work in event cognition can help us reframe Weber's interpretive sociology and deepen the principle of methodological individualism. This helps us get a better view of what the ‘problems’ of Problemgeschichte really are, how they emerge, and why some of them may reach broader significance.

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Structuring memory through inference-based event segmentation

10.31234/osf.io/gqhwv ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Yeon Soon Shin ◽

Sarah DuBrow

Keyword(s):

Memory Retrieval ◽

Relevant Information ◽

Inference Process ◽

Event Cognition ◽

Event Segmentation ◽

Online Processing ◽

Open Questions ◽

Event Segmentation Theory ◽

Underlying Mechanisms ◽

Event Boundary

Although the stream of information we encounter is continuous, our experiences tend to be discretized into meaningful clusters, altering how we represent our past. Event segmentation theory proposes that clustering ongoing experience in this way is adaptive in that it promotes efficient online processing as well as later reconstruction of relevant information. A growing literature supports this theory by demonstrating its important behavioral consequences. Yet the exact mechanisms of segmentation remain elusive. Here, we provide a brief overview of how event segmentation influences ongoing processing, subsequent memory retrieval, and decision making as well as some proposed underlying mechanisms. We then explore how beliefs, or inferences, about what generates our experience may be the foundation of event cognition. In this inference‐based framework, experiences are grouped together according to what is inferred to have generated them. Segmentation then occurs when the inference changes, creating an event boundary. This offers an alternative to dominant theories of event segmentation, allowing boundaries to occur independent of perceptual change and even when transitions are predictable. We describe how this framework can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical findings (e.g., memory can be biased toward both extreme episodes and the average of episodes). Finally, we discuss open questions regarding how time is incorporated into the inference process.

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