Agents' goals affect placement of event endpoints
Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Day-to-day life can be thought of as a series of events. It has been hypothesized that the boundaries of events are characterized by change, including a change in the agent’s goal, but the role of higher-order goal information on event boundaries has not been addressed experimentally. In a series of experiments, we tested whether goals can affect how viewers place event boundaries. Participants read a context sentence containing an agent’s goal (e.g., “Jasmine wants to eat an orange with her breakfast” vs. “Jasmine wants to use an orange to garnish the dessert”). Participants then saw an image of an event outcome (e.g., a partly peeled orange) and were asked to identify whether the event had occurred (“Did she peel the orange?”). Participants were more likely to accept a partly complete outcome if the outcome satisfied the agent’s goal (Experiments 1 and 2). These effects depended on specific interactions of contexts and visual outcomes (Experiment 3). In a further manipulation, participants were more likely to reject a mostly complete outcome if it failed to satisfy the agent’s goal (Experiment 4). We conclude that higher-order goal information affects the way events are conceptualized.