Publisher's Synopsis
It seems that humans perceive events frequently. We seem to see cars moving from one location to another, commercials playing, people having conversations. We seem to hear songs playing, phones ringing, footsteps approaching. We seem to feel breezes blowing, massages, the washing of our hands. We furthermore seem to be able to form beliefs about and act on the basis of the events we apparently perceive. When we hear the phone ringing, we may in effect believe that someone is calling us and, accordingly, answer the phone. Empirical psychology provides further reason to think that we indeed perceive events. Behavioral, psychological, and neural indices show that we parse ongoing perceptual scenes into discrete events (Zacks et al. 2007; Radvansky and Zacks 2017). For example, when shown a movie, participants mark when one event depicted in the movie has ended and another has begun reliably (Zacks et al. 2007). Where participants place these marks affects what they remember from the movie and how accurate their memory of the movie is (Radvansky and Zacks 2017). These marks are correlated with spikes in the activity of certain neural regions, which occur even when participants are not instructed to mark the boundaries between successive events (Zacks et al. 2010). More work is required to establish that we in fact perceive events, and that event perception isn't just a special case of object or property perception. But the existence of the psychological literature on event perception in addition to the intuitive case for event perception is reason to investigate the matter more thoroughly.
