Age differences in the perception of goal structure in everyday activity.

ABSTRACT: Human activity is structured by goals and subgoals. To understand an everyday activity, a viewer must perceive its goal structure, and viewers may segment activity into units that correspond to perceived goals. In this study, we examined age differences in the ability to perceive hierarchical goal structure in ongoing activity. A group of younger and older adults viewed short movies of an actor doing everyday activities, segmented them into events, and described the events as they segmented. We investigated how participants' event descriptions were related to the hierarchical goal structure, and whether participants' event segmentation was related to moment-by-moment changes in actor goals. We found that both coarse and fine event segmentation behavior was related to changes in the goal hi

SUBMITTER: Kurby CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8815086 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature