Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A fundamental aspect of everyday processing involves identifying discrete events within continuously unfoldingsensory experience. However, the processes enabling determination of event boundaries remain poorly understood. Recently,inconsistent conclusions have emerged regarding attentional processes associated with detection of event boundaries. Use ofthe Dwell-Time Paradigm has indicated enhanced attention at event boundaries (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011), whereasevidence from the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm (e.g., Huff, Papenmeier, & Zacks, 2012) indicates impairment.We employed a change-detection procedure similar to the RSVP, except that the change to be detected was uniform across theentire visual field, rather than varying with respect to the viewer’s spatial locus of attention. Changes occurred either at eventboundaries or mid-stream within event segments. With spatial locus of attention rendered irrelevant, participants displayedsignificantly faster reaction time to changes coinciding with event boundaries, implying that viewers selectively target eventboundaries with heightened attention.