Part 2 of the above, the distributed

W. D. Gray, S. Banerjee / Topics in Cognitive Science 13 (2021)
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counter-intuitive, on further thought the logic is compelling. As Hommel emphasizes, perception and action are always closely linked. Almost anything that we perceive can be attributed to some prior movement/action on our part. Even an eye-saccade to an objector to a location is a movement and that movement is what makes the subsequent perception possible. Hence,
by Hommel’s account, perception and action are different parts of one two-stage event where the first part executes a particular movement to produce a particular sensory event. When we speak about the perception, we emphasize the produced event. When we speak about how we produced an event, we emphasize the action.
2.1.2. Event segmentation
Johansson, Hofsten, and Jansson (1980) moved the term event perception away from its older focus on object motion in a passive perceiver” to motion and space perception in connection with action (p. 28). Cutting (1981) followed close behind Johansson with his
“Six tenets for event perception namely,
(1)
events have underlying structure;
(2)
two classes of invariants divide event structure topographic and dynamic;
(3)
dynamic invariants divide into those of wholes and those of parts;
(4)
dynamic invariants divide according to a minimum principle;
(5)
dynamic and topographic invariants yield a center of moment and
(6)
centers of moment are perceptually useful.
All seems to have moved slowly in the study of event perception until two decades later when Zacks and coauthors, in a flurry of four papers published in 2001 (Zacks, 2001; Zacks et al., 2001; Zacks & Tversky, 2001; Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001) reinvented and reinvigorated the study of Event Perception for the new century. Perhaps, most importantly, for our current narrative, 2001 was the year in which Hommel et al. (2001) published The Theory of Event Coding (TEC): A framework for perception and action planning and Zacks published a small commentary on that paper as Scaling up from atomic to complex events,”
which asked whether the claims made by TEC with brief events had implications for longer events, especially those longer events that are the focus of goal-directed activity. Hommel et al. (2001) had made two claims for the use of distal features namely, that action planning based on proximal features is inefficient and that the prediction of future stimulus input is easier with distal features Zacks concluded his brief essay by saying, the implications of the
TEC view for complex events have been more or less assumed in the literature . . . apparently because the arguments for distal features become overwhelming as they scale up (p. 910).”
Event-Predictive Cognition is the offspring of a happy marriage between the Theory of
Event Coding and Event Segmentation. The surge of interest in EPCog has resulted in an important collection of 16 interdisciplinary papers and commentaries recently published in this journal (see Butz et al., 2021, for the introduction and overview to this recent special issue. In its essence, “EPCog sets out to explore the extent to which event-predictive encodings and processes foster the development of abstract, conceptual, compositionally recombinable structures from sensorimotor experiences. It links event-predictive, conceptual structures to both sensorimotor and language structures (Butz et alp. 12).

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