Event Perception from the Perspective of the Problem of Cognitive Development

The study of the event perception is a relatively young, but rapidly developing field of cognitive psychology, which is based on an integrative view of the process of human perception and the cognitive underpinnings of this process. The objective of the study was to identi-fy the specifics of the division of the visual narrative into events by preschoolers, primary school students, high school students and adults, and, based on the obtained data, to recon-struct hypothetically and compare the event models that each of these groups relies on. Wallace Chafe's Pear Film was used as a stimulus material. It is shown that the models of events constructed by preschoolers and primary school stu-dents, are "planar" in nature, while high school students and adults are charac-terized by "volumetric" models. It is also shown that the division of the narrative into events by high school students has no notable difference from that of adults, i.e. the key age for the transition from "planar" to "volumetric" models is a high school age. In addition, for primary school students, a correlation was found between event perception and other cognitive and communication skills. The strongest correlation was found between event perception and the minuteness of the retelling, which provides some evi-dence for the thesis about the domi-nance of "planar" models for primary school students. In addition, the results obtained were considered from the per-spective of the theory of mind also taken in the aspect of cognitive development.