People’s day-to-day lives are made up of events. A regular weekday morning might consist of events such as make coffee, make breakfast, and get ready for work. Events are made up of activities, for example, make coffee might include the activities grind coffee beans, add coffee grinds to the coffee maker, fill the machine with water, and press start. Furthermore, activities are made up of components, such as the specific actions typically performed, and the people, objects, and locations that are involved. People’s knowledge of events and activities, along with their knowledge of the components that make up the activities, is known as “event knowledge”. People acquire event knowledge over time through direct and indirect experiences. One particularly important element of event knowledge is learning how events unfold over time. For example, when making coffee, it is important to know that the coffee grinds and water are added to the coffee machine before pressing the start button. 

We are using Network Science (graph theory) to understand and characterize the complex and variable nature of event knowledge (Brown, Hannah, Christidis, Hall-Bruce, Stevenson, Elman, & McRae, 2024; McRae, Elman, Brown, 2021). Mackenzie Bain is currently investigating how network science can be used to characterize people’s understanding of activity centrality in event knowledge. Centrality (importance) is a key part of event cognition, however, few studies have tried to characterize centrality beyond the conceptualization of centrality capturing some kind of general importance. We used multiple computational measures of network centrality (CheiRank, PageRank, Closeness, Betweenness, and 2D Rank) to predict participants' rankings of centrality on five measures of event-activity centrality. Part of this work has been published in the Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (Bain, Valmana Crocker, Valmana Crocker, Hannah, Brown, McRae, 2025).  

Kara Hannah has studied how the temporal structure of event knowledge relates to autism spectrum disorder and autistic traits (Hannah, Brown, Hall-Bruce, Stevenson, & McRae, 2022). Specifically, social communication is altered in autism, and we believe this may be related to atypical event knowledge. We have also studied how higher-order language skills, such as making inferences, are related to event knowledge and autistic traits. Most recently, Kara collected a large set of normative ratings to evaluate autistic and non-autistic individuals’ experiences of events. This project’s manuscript is currently in preparation, but please refer to the OSF. 

We believe that knowledge of common events is critical to all aspects of conceptual representations and language comprehension and production. We have recently published a neural network model of event knowledge and its interaction with language processing (Elman & McRae, 2019). We have also previously looked at how event knowledge has a role in people’s memory for the meaning of words, in their ability to understand sentences and discourse, and in false memories. 

Object-location associations are links between items and spatial coordinates. These kinds of associations are learned and practiced often in our daily lives. For instance, you may have picked up your mug of coffee and brought it to your desk before getting online to check out Ken’s website. The coffee mug has been placed in a specific location, and you are (almost definitely) able to return to that location when you want another sip. We are interested in two features of object-location association learning. Firstly, that the kinds of items that are frequently part of these object-location associations tend to be things we can easily pick up and move around. Secondly, that these object-location associations are formed by an action from the agent as they place the object in a location. In the current work, we investigate the implications of both of these features.

Embodied cognition suggests that when we think about, or remember concepts without having a referent in front of us, we do so by reactivating the patterns of sensory and motor activity that are elicited as we engage with the items in the environment. A consequence of this claim is that for some items (such as tools) an important constituent of the concept is its motor information: the activity association with holdingthe item, and performing actions with this item. Previous work has investigated the role of a concept’s manipulability on subsequent memory performance, but typically using words as stimuli in a more traditional word list learning paradigm. Since concepts are dynamic and context specific, we are interested in testing the contributions of manipulability in an object-location learning paradigm which (we hypothesize) will increase the relevance of manipulability.

It is also the case that sometimes we manipulate the item during the episode. In the example I described, you might imagine moving your coffee cup to your desk. This is a different type of manipulation than that contained within the concept. Rather than interactions with items that are repeated throughout multiple experiences, the movements you produce as you place an item in a location are specific to the learning episode. Previous work in the enactment literature has shown a boost in memory when an action is performed during learning. Further, spontaneous gesture during learning has been shown to boost recall. In the current work we test whether action during learning boosts recall for object-location associations.

Together, this work highlights two routes through which action shapes memory for object–location associations. In our work so far, we’ve shown evidence of a memory boost for tools, and for concepts learned with the active learning strategy. We interpret this effect as evidence that simulation of the motor information gained through a lifetime of experiences with the concept and simulation of the motor action performed during the learning episode shape object-location association learning. Our findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that memory is fundamentally embodied. 

How do people think about the future?

Episodic future thinking, or the process of simulating and pre-experiencing a potential future event, is a common part of people’s everyday experiences. Thoughts about the future can come to mind through spontaneous (e.g., a future thought seems to “pop” into a person’s mind) or deliberate simulation (e.g., a future thought is directly cued such as, "What are your plans for this weekend?”). Mackenzie’s M.Sc. thesis investigated the role of cues in prompting spontaneous thoughts about the future, and how these cues influenced the characteristics of these future thoughts. Mackenzie also investigated if spontaneous future events, like spontaneous autobiographical memories, are simulated in chained-event sequences (Bain & McRae, 2026). Further, Mackenzie investigated how cue type influences deliberate thoughts about the future and past. This study explored how cue type relates to the characteristics of events that participants generated during an event fluency task, and how these multiple events were internally cued by having participants identify what made them think of each subsequent event. The paper is currently in preparation. 

Claudia Morales Valiente studied how event characteristics, such as the event’s likelihood of occurring and people’s personal familiarity with the event, influences people’s simulation of future events (Morales Valiente, Köhler, & McRae, 2024). Claudia’s dissertation investigated the degree to which imagery is related to deliberate episodic future thinking.