Changes in other’s goals may play a significant role in how people structure everyday experiences. When we see a partner put their book down and then walk to a cupboard we may identify a new event. However, most research demonstrating a relationship between goals and event segmentation use trained experimenters to identify goal changes. But, are people generally sensitive to goal changes as they watch other’s activities during naturalistic perception? And, do the goal changes they identify correspond to event boundaries? In a new paper published in Memory & Cognition (“People can reliably detect action changes and goal changes during naturalistic perception”), Xing Su found that untrained observers are able to reliably identify goal and action changes in everyday events, that the actions they identify are nested within goals, and that goal and action changes contribute to segmentation above and beyond changes in visual motion and object interactions. Xing’s work demonstrates that people can track changes in relatively abstract features of other’s activities and that they may use this information to structure naturalistic experiences.
Can people tell when another person’s goals change?
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