Ten Lectures on the Representation of Events in Language, Perception, Memory, and Action Control

In this series of lectures, Jeffrey M. Zacks offers an account of event representations in language, perception and memory, and applies it to comprehension, memory retrieval, aging and Alzheimer’s disease, and the development of media.

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The representation of events is a central topic for cognitive science. In this series of lectures, Jeffrey M. Zacks situates event representations and their role in language within a theory of perception and memory. Event representations have a distinctive structure and format that result from computational and neural mechanisms operating during perception and language comprehension. A crucial aspect of the mechanisms is that event representations are updated to optimize their predictive utility. This updating has consequences for action control and for long-term memory. Event cognition changes across the adult lifespan and can be impaired by conditions including Alzheimer’s disease. These mechanisms have broad impact on everyday activity, and have shaped the development of media such as cinema and narrative fiction.