Similarities in Object and Event Segmentation: A Geometric Approach to Event Path Segmentation

• Published in: Spatial cognition and computation Vol. 11; no. 3; pp. 254 - 279
• Main Authors: Maguire, Mandy J., Brumberg, Jonathan, Ennis, Michelle, Shipley, Thomas F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.07.2011
• Subjects: Analogies; Corpus Linguistics; Curvature; Equivalence; event perception; event segmentation; Event Semantics; Language Universals; Mathematical analysis; Minima; object segmentation; Perception; Segmentation; Segments
• ISSN: 1387-5868; 1542-7633
• DOI: 10.1080/13875868.2011.566955

Events, like objects, can be decomposed into parts. Path, the spatiotemporal trajectory of an object during an event, is the most commonly labeled event feature across the world's languages, provides important social information, and is increasingly central to theories of general event segmentation. However, little is understood about how adults visually segment paths. We apply theories developed for object segmentation to help understand path segmentation. Overall subjects segmented equivalent object shapes and event paths in similar ways following patterns predicted by Singh and Hoffman's (2001) geometric analysis of object parts. There were two notable differences between object and event segmentation: (1) event parsing occurred at points of negative curvature minima and positive curvature maxima as opposed to simply negative curvature minima; and (2) event parsing was more frequent and variable than object parsing. Implications of these results for event perception and categorization are discussed.