Do we look longer at the moments when one everyday action turns into another?

Details

The research explored how people understand the everyday yet intricate behaviors unfolding around them.

Viewers were presented with self-paced slideshows of everyday activities. The researchers recorded looking times, viewers’ subjective segmentation of activities into action units—called breakpoints—and physical change from one slide to the next. The study also examined slideshows with their slides scrambled.

A detailed comparison of the joint time courses of these measures showed that looking time and physical change both reached local maxima at breakpoints. Both were also greater for higher-level action units than for lower-level action units.

Even when the slideshows were scrambled, viewers looked longer at breakpoints than at ordinary moments, and breakpoints showed greater physical differences than ordinary moments. This indicated that breakpoints were distinct even outside their context.

The researchers characterized breakpoints as bridges: from one action to another, from one level to another, and from perception to conception.