‘Visual Verbs’: Extracting Categorical Event Types in Visual Processing • Brian Scholl • ICPA 2026

Brian Scholl explores how seeing an event can include apparent information about its past and likely future. Demonstrations with shapes, objects and action categories ask whether visual processing represents more than what is physically present in a single moment. A damaged or transformed object can suggest an earlier state, such as a whole object before a piece was removed. Experiments on apparent shape change investigate whether these implied histories influence visual experience. The question is whether an effect occurs within perceptual processing or only in a later explicit inference. Block towers offer another test. Their physical arrangement constrains the order in which they could plausibly have been assembled. Manipulating the timing of appearances examines whether this implied causal history affects judgments about what appeared first or whether events occurred together. The talk also considers categories of actions and changes. Differences between events such as pouring and scooping can influence sensitivity beyond the size of a physical stimulus change. Examples of anticipated continuation similarly ask how the kind of event shapes what observers experience or remember next. Scholl presents these findings as evidence for richer event representations while discussing how to distinguish perception from interpretation. The linked paper addresses perceived causal history, one component of the broader talk. The demonstrations invite precise experiments on what visual systems extract from organized change. Presenter: Brian Scholl ICPA 2026, Omaha, Nebraska, June 24–26, 2026. CHAPTERS 00:00 Seeing events, not just static objects 02:27 Can we perceive the recent past? 04:47 Testing perceived histories of shape change 08:44 What a block tower reveals about its history 12:33 Event categories and visual processing 16:20 Main takeaways 17:52 Questions about perception and interpretation KEY TERMS Event perception: Perception of an organized occurrence, including relations among changes rather than only successive static images. Causal history: The sequence of prior events implied by a present configuration. Experiments ask whether such implied history influences perception even without deliberate reconstruction. Categorical perception: A pattern in which category membership affects discrimination beyond physical distance alone. Appropriate within- and across-category comparisons are needed. Apparent motion: Perceived motion generated by discrete presentations rather than continuous physical displacement. It provides a tool for testing constraints on perceived transformations. Perceptual extrapolation: A shift toward an event's implied continuation in perception or immediate report. The task must distinguish visual processing from memory and response effects. RELATED PAPERS Published causal-history study: Chen & Scholl (2016). The perception of history: Seeing causal history in static shapes induces illusory motion perception. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616628525 Related block-tower manuscript; under review: Wong, Shah & Scholl. Seeing from the ground up: Spontaneous perception of “causal history” due to intuitive physics. https://kimwwong.github.io/publications/