Finding Structure in Modern Dance

Research has shown that both adults and children organize familiar activity into discrete units with consistent boundaries, despite the dynamic, continuous nature of everyday experiences. However, less is known about how observers segment unfamiliar event sequences. In the current study, we took advantage of the novelty that is inherent in modern dance. Modern dance features natural human motion but does not contain canonical goals-therefore, observers cannot recruit prior goal-related knowledge to segment it. Our main aims were to identify whether observers segment modern dance into the steps intended by the dancers, and what types of cues contribute to segmentation under these circumstances. Experiment 1 used a classic event segmentation task and found that adults were able to consistently identify only a few of the dancers' intended steps. Experiment 2 tested adults in an offline labeling task. Results showed that steps which could more easily be labeled offline in Experiment 2 were more likely to be segmented online in Experiment 1.