The purpose in bringing together the authors in this volume is best explained by decomposing its title: "Developmental Spans in Event Comprehension and Representation: Bridging Fictional and Actual Events". This book is about building bridges - all sorts of bridges. At the most basic level, it concerns the bridges that individuals build in order to understand the events that they experience; it is about bridges that connect the events in the mind's eye. At another level, it is about bridges that interconnect findings and theoretical frameworks concerning event comprehension and representation in different age groups, ranging from infancy to adulthood. Finally, it is about building bridges between researchers who share interests, yet may not ordinarily even be aware of each other's work. The individuals whose work is represented in this book conduct their work in a shared environment - they all have an intellectual and scholarly interest in event comprehension and representation. These interests are manifest in the overlapping themes of their work.
These include a focus on how people come to temporally integrate individual "snapshots" to form a coherent event that unfolds over time, to understand cause and effect, and to appreciate the role of the goal of events. Another overlapping theme involves the possibility of individual differences. These themes are apparent in work on the early development of representations of specific episodes and autobiographical memories, and comprehension of complex events such as stories involving multiple characters and emotions. The editors of this volume had two missions: to create a development span by bringing together researchers working from infancy to adulthood, and to create a bridge between individuals working from within the text comprehension perspective, within the naturalistic perspective, and with laboratory analogues to the naturalistic perspective. Their measure of success will be the extent to which they have been able to create a picture of the course of development across a wide span in chronological age, and across different type of events - from fictional to actual.