This review examines theoretical assumptions and computational models of event comprehension, tracing the evolution from discourse comprehension theories to contemporary event cognition frameworks. The review covers key discourse comprehension accounts, including Construction-Integration, Event Indexing, Causal Network, and Resonance models, highlighting their contributions to understanding cognitive processes in comprehension. I then discuss contemporary theoretical frameworks of event comprehension, including Event Segmentation Theory (Zacks et al., 2007), the Event Horizon Model (Radvansky & Zacks, 2014), and Hierarchical Generative Framework (Kuperberg, 2021), which emphasize prediction, causality, and multilevel representations in event understanding. Building on these theories, I evaluate five computational models of event comprehension: REPRISE (Butz et al., 2019), Structured Event Memory (SEM; Franklin et al., 2020), the Lu model (Lu et al., 2022), the Gumbsch model (Gumbsch et al., 2022), and the Elman and McRae model (2019). The analysis focuses on their approaches to hierarchical processing, prediction mechanisms, and representation learning. Key themes that emerge include the use of hierarchical structures as inductive biases, the importance of prediction in comprehension, and diverse strategies for learning event dynamics. The review identifies critical areas for future research, including the need for more sophisticated approaches to learning structured representations, integrating episodic memory mechanisms, and developing adaptive updating algorithms for working event models. By synthesizing insights from both theoretical frameworks and computational implementations, this review aims to advance our understanding of human event comprehension and guide future modeling efforts in cognitive science.

Humans spontaneously perceive a continuous stream of experience as discrete events. It has been hypothesized that this ability is supported by latent cause inference (LCI). We implemented this hypothesis using Latent Cause Network (LCNet), a neural network model of LCI. LCNet interacts with a Bayesian LCI mechanism that activates a unique context vector for each inferred latent cause. This architecture makes LCNet more biologically plausible than existing models of LCI and supports extraction of shared structure across latent causes. Across three simulations, we found that LCNet could 1) extract shared structure across latent causes in a function-learning task while avoiding catastrophic interference, 2) capture human data on curriculum effects in schema learning, and 3) infer the underlying event structure when processing naturalistic videos of daily activities. Our work provides a biologically plausible computational model that can operate in both laboratory experiment settings and naturalistic settings, opening up the possibility of providing a unified model of event cognition.