Same action, different level: Descriptions of perceived or predicted actions depend on preceding temporal gaps in event streams.

Events and activities consist not only of sequences of individual actions, but also they form hierarchies comprising chains of low-level actions grouped together to form higher level activities. Therefore, observers face the task of not only segmenting a continuous event stream into discrete units, but also processing these units on an appropriate level of aggregation. In 3 experiments, we show that for events observed in an incomplete, piecemeal manner, the temporal extension of event gaps influences the level of hierarchy at which an observer processes the presented event (Experiments 1a and 1b) and that the level of hierarchy is also transferred to an anticipated subsequent event (Experiment 2). Participants viewed film clips showing everyday activities with short or long temporal gaps between the successive shots presenting different aspects of the same activity. The participants' levels of processing were captured via the cued recall of their descriptions of what they had seen in the film clip or via the formulations they used when describing what they expected to happen next. Our findings suggest an extended model of event cognition: Viewers aim to represent events continuously and therefore extrapolate in the case of gaps by shifting to higher levels of description. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).