How Does the Mind Render Streaming Experience as Events?

Baldwin, D.

They are a constructed experience; they aren?t what actually occurs. What occurs is ongoing dynamic, multidimensional, sensory flow, which is somehow transformed via psychological processes into structured, describable, memorable units of experience. This perspective on event processing engenders overarching questions such as: What is the nature of the redescription processes that fluently render dynamic sensory streams as event representations? How are event redescription skills acquired? Are there stable individual differences in such skill? If so, what accounts for this variability, and how might such differences affect cognitive and social functioning?
Monitoring predictability structure via statistical learning appears to be key to event redescription. That is, the experience of bounded events (e.g., words within speech, actions within behavior) seems to arise with the detection of ?troughs? in sensory predictability. These regions of predictable unpredictability provide articulation points to demarcate one event from another in representations derived from the actual streaming information. A fluent event processor implicitly predicts such troughs and selectively targets them as sensory streams unfold. Such findings point to acquisition of event processing fluency - whether in action or language -- depending crucially on cognitive reorganization as knowledge of predictability grows.