Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo will be defending his dissertation:

Spontaneous and Hierarchical segmentation of non-functional events.

The defence will take place on wednesday June 27th 2012 at Aarhus University, Department of Culture and Society, Taasingegade 3, Auditorium 2, room 112, Building 1441.

Assesment committee:

• Professor, Dr.Phil. Armin Geertz (chairman), Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Professor, PhD Pascal Boyer, Department of Psycology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA
• Professor, PhD Don Braxton, Department of Religious Studies, Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, USA

Supervisor:

• Associate Professor, Dr.Phil. Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark

Co-supervisor:

• ­Associate professor, PhD Jesper Soerensen, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark
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The defence will be conducted in English by Associate Professor, PhD Lene Kühle

A copy of the dissertation will be available for perusal prior to the defence at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Taasingegade 3, Building 1443.

Spontaneous and Hierarchical Segmentation of Non-funcional Events

The dissertation, Spontaneous and Hierarchical Segmentation of Non-functional Events, explores and tests human perception of so-called non-functional events (i.e., event or action sequences that lack a necessary link between sequence sub-actions and seqence goal). Non-functional events are typically embedded in or constitute ritual behavior in a range of cultural contexts. Since ritual behavior is one of the primary behavioral expressions of religious belief and practice, a substantial part of the dissertation is devoted to modeling if and how such contextual information and cultural priors can modulate human event perception. A dual approach is applied in the dissertation's empirical part, which combines behavioral experiments with computer simulations. The results indicate that non-functional events increase prediction  error and attentional load, which lead to a saturation of working memory resources. Furthermore, unique contextual information associated with the non-functional events (e.g., religious beliefs) can modulate the magnitude of these effects, and stabilize the event segmentation system. Finally, the dissertation offers a mechanistic model of perception of non-functional events that can be generalized to the level of cultural ritual behavior.

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