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The way our minds encode information impacts our lives on a daily basis. It determines how we learn and retain, what we recall after a unique experience, and how long we can remember the events. Research on the working of memory has shown that chunking facilitates subsequent recall through the regrouping of informational units. Event segmentation involves the chunking of visual information. This master’s thesis investigates the relationship between event segmentation and subsequent event memory, while taking into account the possible influence of more general cognitive abilities. Specifically, this study examines whether the ability to segment events can predict subsequent memory above and beyond working memory and executive functioning, hereby replicating basic parts of the set-up used by Sargent et al. (2013). They found that segmentation ability does predict event memory above and beyond the contributions of general cognitive abilities. It was expected that the outcome would be similar despite the differences between the studies. The hypothesis was tested with an online application of tests focusing on event segmentation ability, event memory, working memory and executive functioning on Qualtrics. First, to measure segmentation ability, participants were asked to segment the ongoing behavior in a movie. Second, to measure event memory, participants had to write down as much as they could remember from that movie, followed by choosing which of two frames was directly from the movie and finally, put a collection of frames from the movie in the correct order. Last, to measure working memory and executive functioning participants respectively completed shortened versions of the reading span and the operation span task, and a shortened version of the reading with distraction task, all inspired by the set-up of the original tests. Due to the misconstruction of one subtest, and the low internal consistency of three others, the measures of different segmentation-related abilities were unreliable. The residual cognitive test showed that working memory was not significantly related to segmentation ability and the test was not reliable enough to make strong conclusions regarding the main hypothesis. The correlation between segmentation ability and subsequent event memory was low, possibly due to the fact that only one rater scored the results of the residual event memory task. In conclusion, the core question could not be answered.

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Age, gender and race are by many researchers referred to as the three primitive categories used when you perceive others. Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides (2001), however, doubt the status of race as a primitive category. In their 2001 study, they argue, on the basis of six experiments, that race is a byproduct of categorizing in terms of coalition. In this master's thesis, we replicated the study of Kurzban et al. (2001) to ascertain whether the same effect can be observed. By replicating the experiment of Kurzban et al. (2001), we wanted to examine the status of race. A first - high powered - replication study was conducted in the USA. A second replication study was performed in Flanders. The methods and materials of both replications were the same; only the adopted language differed. In the two conditions of both experiments, participants first saw a discussion between two basketball teams on the basis of written sentences and photographs of the players. In the instructions preceding the conversation, participants were asked to form an impression of the players. After this first phase, the participants were presented with a short distractor task. In the last phase of the experiment, a surprise recall task followed where the participants had to match the right photograph and sentence from the first phase again. The difference between both conditions was that in the first condition, also called the verbal cue condition, participants could only use the verbal utterances the players made to determine team membership. However, in the second condition, the visual cue condition, team membership was indicated by means of different t-shirt colors (grey and yellow) so participants could not only use verbal cues but also visual cues. In the last phase of the experiment, participants obviously made a lot of errors, i.e. a mismatch between a sentence and a photograph. Four types of errors were possible (same team same race, different team same race, same team different race and different team different race), wherefrom two scores (coalitional encoding and racial encoding) could be derived. These errors and scores are essential when analyzing the results. In the USA study, we observed the same effect (but with lower effect sizes) as Kurzban et al. (2001), that is a decrease in racial encoding and an increase in coalitional encoding when visual cues (i.e. different t-shirt colors) are present. In the Flemish study, we observed a similar effect for coalition encoding, but an insignificant effect for racial encoding. This insignificant effect could be due to the low power of the study (the sample size was too small). Another hypothetical explanation could be the difference in social context, as blacks have another status in America than in Europe/Belgium.

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Sociolinguistics --- Psycholinguistics