Event Schema Stimuli

The stimuli were designed to conform to two naturalistic schematic scripts that we expected to be familiar to all our subjects: eating at a restaurant, or catching a flight at an airport. Each scenario consisted of four events. For the restaurant stories, the events were: entering and being taken to a table, sitting with menus, ordering food and waiting for its arrival, and food arriving and being eaten. For the airport stories, the events were: entering the airport, going through the security checkpoint, walking to and waiting at the gate, and getting onboard the airplane and sitting in a seat.<br>Each story was approximately 3 minutes long. To identify schema representations that were modality-invariant, we presented 4 audio-visual movies and 4 spoken narratives for each of the two schemas. The stories all involved different characters and spanned multiple genres, sharing only the same high-level schematic script. The movies were sampled from films in which the restaurant schema was depicted (Brazil, Derek, Mr. Bean, Pulp Fiction) or the airport schema was depicted (Due Date, Good Luck Chuck, Knight and Day, Non-stop), and were edited for time and to conform as closely as possible to the four-stage schema script. The audio narratives were adapted from film scripts with a restaurant scene (The Big Bang Theory, The Santa Clause, Shame, My Cousin Vinny) or an airport scene (Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Seinfeld, Up in the Air), also edited for length and to match the schematic script. All narratives were read by the same professional actor.