# A Review of Mechanistic Models of Event Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18992/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [Using Fast Weights to Attend to the Recent Past](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06258/) (2016)
- [Causal Influence Detection for Improving Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03443/) (2021)
- [Sparsely Changing Latent States for Prediction and Planning in Partially Observable Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15949/) (2021)
- [Learning, Planning, and Control in a Monolithic Neural Event Inference Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07412/) (2018)
- [A neural network trained to predict future video frames mimics critical properties of biological neuronal responses and perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10734/) (2018)
- [Basic Reasoning with Tensor Product Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02745/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This review examines theoretical assumptions and computational models of event comprehension, tracing the evolution from discourse comprehension theories to contemporary event cognition frameworks. The review covers key discourse comprehension accounts, including Construction-Integration, Event Indexing, Causal Network, and Resonance models, highlighting their contributions to understanding cognitive processes in comprehension. I then discuss contemporary theoretical frameworks of event comprehension, including Event Segmentation Theory (Zacks et al., 2007), the Event Horizon Model (Radvansky & Zacks, 2014), and Hierarchical Generative Framework (Kuperberg, 2021), which emphasize prediction, causality, and multilevel representations in event understanding. Building on these theories, I evaluate five computational models of event comprehension: REPRISE (Butz et al., 2019), Structured Event Memory (SEM; Franklin et al., 2020), the Lu model (Lu et al., 2022), the Gumbsch model (Gumbsch et al., 2022), and the Elman and McRae model (2019). The analysis focuses on their approaches to hierarchical processing, prediction mechanisms, and representation learning. Key themes that emerge include the use of hierarchical structures as inductive biases, the importance of prediction in comprehension, and diverse strategies for learning event dynamics. The review identifies critical areas for future research, including the need for more sophisticated approaches to learning structured representations, integrating episodic memory mechanisms, and developing adaptive updating algorithms for working event models. By synthesizing insights from both theoretical frameworks and computational implementations, this review aims to advance our understanding of human event comprehension and guide future modeling efforts in cognitive science.