Theories of event cognition have 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 the placement of event boundaries has not been addressed experimentally. We tested whether goals can affect how viewers determine event boundaries. Participants read a context sentence stating an agent’s goal (e.g., “Jesse wants to eat the orange with her breakfast” vs. “Jesse wants to use the orange as a garnish”). 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 respond Yes to a partly complete outcome if the outcome satisfied the agent’s goal. Our results offer the first direct evidence in support of the conclusion that higher-order intentionality information affects the way events are conceptualized.

Words are learned in various contexts and over various timescales throughout our lives. The current study exploredthe role of context in the form of negation in artificial language learning. It was predicted that words trained in an entirelynegated context would show lower average correctness in the testing phase than those trained entirely in the affirmative or inthe combined contexts. Eighteen artificial nouns were trained using the prefixes “an-” meaning “not the” or “o-” meaning “the”to mark negation. In the testing phase, participants were tested without the prefix on word stems only. Findings indicatedwords learned solely in the affirmative context led to a higher average correctness while those learned solely in the presence ofnegation showed the least average correctness in the testing phase.

Mind wandering is a prevalent but highly subjective phenomenon that is difficult to measure. Typically studies use probes at random points throughout at study that pop in and ask participants “Are you mind wandering” where they indicate yes or no, and then resume the study. This study investigated a method of extracting eye blinks from raw eye tracking data while participants were reading texts that varied in degree of engagingness on a similar topic. Blink durations were found to increase for less engaging texts. We hypothesize that eye blink durations may increase with mind wandering and discuss implications for mind wandering research.