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. 

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.