Construction of event models

Everyday activities are composed of component events that are organized chronologically. Their temporal order is stored in long-term memory in so-called scripts (Shank & Abelson, 1977) that enable the generation of predictions about upcoming events (see Zacks et al., 2007). Different components are related to the events like agents, objects or their states. According to Zacks et al. (2007) knowledge about a certain event is represented in an event model in working memory. This project investigates whether attention can modulate this working memory representation. Further, the influence of working memory capacity and the cognitive resource consumption during the construction of the event model will be examined using behavioral and psychophysiological (pupillometry) measures. Especially the pupillary response is a valid and reliable index of cognitive resource consumption during processing.