Aging and the segmentation of narrative film

ABSTRACT

The perception of event structure in continuous activity is important for everyday comprehension. Although the segmentation of experience into events is a normal concomitant of perceptual processing, previous research has shown age differences in the ability to perceive structure in naturalistic activity, such as a movie of someone washing a car. However, past research has also shown that older adults have a preserved ability to comprehend events in narrative text, which suggests that narrative may improve the event processing of older adults. This study tested whether there are age differences in event segmentation at the intersection of continuous activity and narrative: narrative film. Younger and older adults watched and segmented a narrative film, The Red Balloon, into coarse and fine events. Changes in situational features, such as changes in characters, goals, and objects predicted segmentation. Analyses revealed little age-difference in segmentation behavior. This suggests the possibility that narrative structure supports event understanding for older adults.

Keywords:

• Event segmentation
• Aging
• Comprehension
• Narrative
• Event cognition
• Film

This research was partially supported by a grant from the GVSU Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence.

Notes

¹Four younger adults had particular difficulty answering correctly for the MMSE item that asks for the participant to count backwards by sevens from 100. Removing those participants from the analyses did not change the results. The younger adult MMSE mean with those participants removed was 28.08. Within the older adult group, age was negatively correlated with MMSE, r(38) = –.37, p = .019, d = 0.80.

²Removing processing speed as a covariate produced the same pattern of results.

³There was a significant main effect of movie clip, F(3, 234) = 5.43, MSE = 228, p = .004, η_p² = .05, such that agreement was highest for clip one.

⁴These odds ratios were computed from within-age-group mixed effect models including the same predictors as those in the main analysis, except for age.

⁵These odds ratios were computed from within-age-group mixed effect models including the same predictors as those in the main analysis, except for age.