Filling the gap despite full attention: the role of fast backward inferences for event completion

Abstract The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. With four experiments, we studied the completion of missing information despite full attention. Participants watched short soccer video clips and we informed participants that we removed a critical moment of ball contact in half of the clips. We asked participants to detect whether these moments of ball contact were present or absent. In Experiment 1, participants gave their detection responses either directly during an event or delayed after an event. Although participants directed their full attention toward the critical contact moment, they were more likely to indicate seeing the missing ball contact if it was followed by a causally matching scene than if it was followed by an unrelated scene, both for the immediate and delayed responses. Thus, event completion occurs quickly. In Experiment 2, only a causally matching scene but neither a white mask nor an irrelevant scene caused the completion of missing information. This indicates that the completion of missing information is caused by backward inferences rather than predictive perception. In Experiment 3, we showed that event completion occurs directly during a trial and does not depend on expectations built up after seeing the same causality condition multiple times. In Experiment 4, we linked our findings to event cognition by asking participants to perform a natural segmentation task. We conclude that observers complete missing information during coherent events based on a fast backward inference mechanism even when directing their attention toward the missing information