Event Related Message Processing: Perceiving and Remembering Changes in Films with and without Soundtrack

Abstract

Humans perceive changes in the continuous stream of sensory information as event boundaries. Although event boundary perception is thought of as a general mechanism, there is some evidence that it might depend on stimulus modality. As an example, memory for event boundaries is higher than memory for non-event boundaries. Yet, this event boundary advantage has only been demonstrated with visual dynamic scenes and has failed to replicate with audiovisual dynamic scenes. As previous work on attention allocation in mediated message processing showed, auditory information has an underestimated, and still inconclusive, impact on audiovisual information encoding and memorization. Because auditory information changes basic visual processes, it is thus possible that event boundary perception depends on stimulus modality. We report three within-subjects experiments that studied how humans perceive and remember changes in visual and audiovisual dynamic scenes using a single set of stimuli. We observed basic processes of event perception (event segmentation, change detection, and memory) to be independent of stimulus modality. We thus conclude that event boundary perception is a general perceptual-cognitive mechanism