Culture influences how people divide continuous sensory experience into events

Everyday experience is divided into meaningful events as a part of human perception. Current accounts of this process, known as event segmentation, focus on how characteristics of the experience (e.g., situation changes) influence segmentation. However, characteristics of the viewers themselves have been largely neglected. We test whether one such viewer characteristic, their cultural background, impacts online event segmentation. Culture could impact event segmentation (1) by emphasizing different aspects of experiences as being important for comprehension, memory, and communication, and (2) by providing different exemplars of how everyday activities are performed, which objects are likely to be used, and how scenes are laid out. Indian and US viewers (N = 152) identified events in everyday activities (e.g., making coffee) recorded in Indian and US settings. Consistent with their cultural preference for analytical processing, US viewers segmented the activities into more events than did Indian viewers. Furthermore, event boundaries identified by US viewers were more strongly associated with visual changes, whereas boundaries identified by Indian viewers were more strongly associated with goal changes. There was no evidence that familiarity with an activity impacted segmentation. Thus, culture impacts event perception by altering the types of information people prioritize when dividing experience into meaningful events.