Event Boundaries and Memory

According to theories of event cognition, people parse information into event models, and this parsing can have meaningful influences on cognition. The current study explores the idea that by parsing a larger set of narrative information into separate events, memory for that text can be improved. Specifically, this event parsing may create reduced interference, thereby facilitating memory. Alternatively, it may be that people encode information at an event boundary, which causes an increase only for memory at that point. Moreover, in may be that increasing the number of event boundaries can give an even larger benefit. Some pilot work suggested that this may be the case, but this work was not definitive. In the following experiments, people were given sets of stories to read in which the number of event boundaries was explicitly manipulated. The results of this work show there is improved memory overall for the narrative as a whole, which has implications for theories of event cognition, as well as for theories of memory more generally.