Abstract
The human mind decodes, processes, and makes sense of a continual flow of
dynamic information, taken from an array of sensory inputs. Compelling
behavioural and neuroimaging evidence reveals that humans segment
activities into meaningful chunks for processing, and this phenomenon has
profound implications for learning, memory and understanding the world
around us (Newtson, 1973; Zacks and Tversky, 2001; Zacks et al., 2001).
Whilst the existence of event segmentation is widely accepted, it remains
unclear what cognitive mechanisms drive this ability.
This thesis constitutes a series of behavioural and neuroimaging
experiments that investigate top-down and bottom-up influences on event
segmentation. The neuroimaging studies presented here are novel; they
extend the field by investigating event segmentation using scalp-recorded
electroencephalography (EEG). Event Related Potentials (ERPs, derived from
EEG using signal-averaging procedures) showed that the perceptual
processing of event boundaries is differentially sensitive to the segmentation
of activities into small or large chunks, consistent with findings from
previous neuroimaging research (Zacks et al., 2001). In contrast with
previous findings, the electrophysiological investigations elicited responses
that were clearly affected by manipulating top-down information (e.g.,
participant's knowledge about the activity being segmented). The results
from the studies reported in the thesis support an account of the perceptual
processing of event boundaries, which incorporates both top-down and
bottom-up influences.
