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Understanding and remembering the complex experiences of everyday life relies critically on prior schematic knowledge about how events in our world unfold over time. How does the brain construct event representations from a library of schematic scripts, and how does activating a specific script impact the way that events are segmented in time? We developed a novel set of 16 audio narratives, each of which combines one of four location-relevant event scripts (restaurant, airport, grocery store, and lecture hall) with one of four socially relevant event scripts (breakup, proposal, business deal, and meet cute), and presented them to participants in an fMRI study and a separate online study. Responses in the angular gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were driven by scripts related to both location and social information, showing that these regions can track schematic sequences from multiple domains. For some stories, participants were primed to attend to one of the two scripts by training them to listen for and remember specific script-relevant episodic details. Activating a location-related event script shifted the timing of subjective event boundaries to align with script-relevant changes in the narratives, and this behavioral shift was mirrored in the timing of neural responses, with mPFC event boundaries (identified using a hidden Markov model) aligning to location-relevant rather than socially relevant boundaries when participants were location primed. Our findings demonstrate that neural event dynamics are actively modulated by top-down goals and provide new insight into how narrative event representations are constructed through the activation of temporally structured prior knowledge. [Display omitted] • Default mode regions represent schematic event scripts during narrative perception • Attending to an event script impacts behavioral event segmentation and memory • Neural dynamics in the mPFC reflect the event structure of an attended script De Soares et al. find that priming participants to attend to a schematic event script can change the way that a narrative stimulus is behaviorally and neurally segmented into perceptual events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of musical phrase boundaries is a critical aspect of human musical experience: It allows us to organize, understand, derive pleasure from, and remember music. Identifying boundaries is a prerequisite for segmenting music into meaningful chunks, facilitating efficient processing and storage while providing an enjoyable, fulfilling listening experience through the anticipation of upcoming musical events. Expanding on Sridharan et al.'s [Neuron 55, 521-532 (2007)] work on coarse musical boundaries between symphonic movements, we examined finer-grained boundaries. We measured the fMRI responses of 18 musicians and 18 nonmusicians during music listening. Using general linear model, independent component analysis, and Granger causality, we observed heightened auditory integration in anticipation to musical boundaries, and an extensive decrease within the fronto-temporal-parietal network during and immediately following boundaries. Notably, responses were modulated by musicianship. Findings uncover the intricate interplay between musical structure, expertise, and cognitive processing, advancing our knowledge of how the brain makes sense of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During our everyday life, the constant flow of information is divided into discrete events, a process conceptualized in Event Segmentation Theory (EST). How people perform event segmentation and the resulting granularity of encapsulated segments likely depends on their metacontrol style. Yet, the underlying neural mechanisms remain undetermined. The current study examines how the metacontrol style affects event segmentation through the analysis of EEG data using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and source localization analysis. We instructed two groups of healthy participants to either segment a movie as fine‐grained as possible (fine‐grain group) or provided no such instruction (free‐segmentation group). The fine‐grain group showed more segments and a higher likelihood to set event boundaries upon scene changes, which supports the notion that cognitive control influences segmentation granularity. On a neural level, representational dynamics were decodable 400 ms prior to the decision to close a segment and open a new one, and especially fronto‐polar regions (BA10) were associated with this representational dynamic. Groups differed in their use of this representational dynamics to guide behavior and there was a higher sensitivity to incoming information in the Fine‐grain group. Moreover, a higher likelihood to set event boundaries was reflected by activity increases in the insular cortex suggesting an increased monitoring of potentially relevant upcoming events. The study connects the EST with the metacontrol framework and relates these to overarching neural concepts of prefrontal cortex function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How we perceive the physical world is not only organized in terms of objects, but also structured in time as sequences of events. This is especially evident in intuitive physics, with temporally bounded dynamics such as falling, occlusion, and bouncing demarcating the continuous flow of sensory inputs. While the spatial structure and attentional consequences of physical objects have been well-studied, much less is known about the temporal structure and attentional consequences of physical events in visual perception. Previous work has recognized physical events as units in the mind, and used presegmented object interactions to explore physical representations. However, these studies did not address whether and how perception imposes the kind of temporal structure that carves these physical events to begin with, and the attentional consequences of such segmentation during intuitive physics. Here, we use performance-based tasks to address this gap. In Experiment 1, we find that perception not only spontaneously separates visual input in time into physical events, but also, this segmentation occurs in a nonlinear manner within a few hundred milliseconds at the moment of the event boundary. In Experiment 2, we find that event representations, once formed, use coarse "look ahead" simulations to selectively prioritize those objects that are predictively part of the unfolding dynamics. This rich temporal and predictive structure of physical event representations, formed during vision, should inform models of intuitive physics. Public Significance Statement: Despite the continuous flow of sensory inputs, our perceptual experiences are deeply structured in space in terms of objects and in time in terms of events. In many ways, most research in visual perception has focused on half of this structure: objects. To help reveal the structure of the other half, we turn to intuitive physics—our ability to see and predict how scenes react to forces—where events are especially evident. In intuitive physics, we do not just see objects with certain physical properties occupying certain places, but we experience dynamic patterns of interactions, for example, falling, colliding, bouncing, and entering and exiting containers. In two experiments with human observers, we synthesize methods and theories across the studies of attention, music cognition, seeing, and thinking, and find that the visual system spontaneously marks physical events at subsecond timescales and prioritizes objects relevant to the ongoing event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music, like spoken language, is often characterized by hierarchically organized structure. Previous experiments have shown neural tracking of notes and beats, but little work touches on the more abstract question: how does the brain establish high-level musical structures in real time? We presented Bach chorales to participants (20 females and 9 males) undergoing electroencephalogram (EEG) recording to investigate how the brain tracks musical phrases. We removed the main temporal cues to phrasal structures, so that listeners could only rely on harmonic information to parse a continuous musical stream. Phrasal structures were disrupted by locally or globally reversing the harmonic progression, so that our observations on the original music could be controlled and compared. We first replicated the findings on neural tracking of musical notes and beats, substantiating the positive correlation between musical training and neural tracking. Critically, we discovered a neural signature in the frequency range ~0.1 Hz (modulations of EEG power) that reliably tracks musical phrasal structure. Next, we developed an approach to quantify the phrasal phase precession of the EEG power, revealing that phrase tracking is indeed an operation of active segmentation involving predictive processes. We demonstrate that the brain establishes complex musical structures online over long timescales (>5 s) and actively segments continuous music streams in a manner comparable to language processing. These two neural signatures, phrase tracking and phrasal phase precession, provide new conceptual and technical tools to study the processes underpinning high-level structure building using noninvasive recording techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a part of ongoing perception, the human cognitive system segments others' activities into discrete episodes (event segmentation). Although prior research has shown that this process is likely related to changes in an actor's actions and goals, it has not yet been determined whether untrained observers can reliably identify action and goal changes as naturalistic activities unfold, or whether the changes they identify are tied to visual features of the activity (e.g., the beginnings and ends of object interactions). This study addressed these questions by examining untrained participants' identification of action changes, goal changes, and event boundaries while watching videos of everyday activities that were presented in both first-person and third-person perspectives. We found that untrained observers can identify goal changes and action changes consistently, and these changes are not explained by visual change and the onsets or offsets of contact with objects. Moreover, the action and goal changes identified by untrained observers were associated with event boundaries, even after accounting for objective visual features of the videos. These findings suggest that people can identify action and goal changes consistently and with high agreement, that they do so by using sensory information flexibly, and that the action and goal changes they identify may contribute to event segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD versions were utilized, differing in the explicitness of conveyed event boundaries. Results reveal that the participants without sight generally perceived event boundaries similarly to their sighted peers, affirming AD's effectiveness in conveying event structures. However, when key event boundaries were more implicitly expressed, event boundary recognition diminished. Collectively, these findings offer valuable insights into event segmentation processes across sensory modalities. Additionally, they underscore the significance of how AD presents event boundaries, influencing the perception and interpretation of audiovisual media for people with a visual impairment and providing applied insights into event segmentation, multimodal processing, and audiovisual accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event segmentation tests have shown substantial overlaps in how adults recognize starts and endpoints as events unfold. However, far less is known about what role different language systems play in the process. Variations in grammatical aspect have been shown to influence event processing. We tested how closely first language (L1) speakers of Mandarin and English versus Mandarin learners of English as a second language (L2) align event boundaries with event‐internal changes. We used two event boundary marking tasks (online/offline) and a sorting task. Participants saw 60 animations; their task was to indicate starts and endpoints. For punctual events (e.g., breaking a wall), Mandarin L1 speakers and Mandarin learners of English L2 were significantly further from event transitions than English L1 speakers. This pattern was replicated in the untimed experiment but not in sorting transitions, jointly suggesting that Mandarin L1 and Mandarin learners of English L2 may be less attentive to segmentation of phases surrounding transitions than English L1 speakers. We argue that this variation reflects L1‐specific encoding of ongoingness. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event boundaries and temporal context shape the organization of episodic memories. We hypothesized that attentional fluctuations during encoding serve as "events" that affect temporal context representations and recall organization. Individuals encoded trial-unique objects during a modified sustained attention task. Memory was tested with free recall. Response time variability during the encoding tasks was used to characterize "in the zone" and "out of the zone" attentional states. We predicted that: 1) "in the zone", vs. "out of the zone", attentional states should be more conducive to maintaining temporal context representations that can cue temporally organized recall; and 2) temporally distant "in the zone" states may enable more recall "leaps" across intervening items. We replicated several important findings in the sustained attention and memory fields, including more online errors during "out of the zone" vs. "in the zone" attentional states and recall that was temporally structured. Yet, across four studies, we found no evidence for either of our main hypotheses. Recall was robustly temporally organized, and there was no difference in recall organization for items encoded "in the zone" vs. "out of the zone". We conclude that temporal context serves as a strong scaffold for episodic memory, one that can support organized recall even for items encoded during relatively poor attentional states. We also highlight the numerous challenges in striking a balance between sustained attention tasks (long blocks of a repetitive task) and memory recall tasks (short lists of unique items) and describe strategies for researchers interested in uniting these two fields.

Our daily experiences unfold continuously, but we remember them as a series of discrete events through a process called event segmentation. Prominent theories of event segmentation suggest that event boundaries in memory are triggered by significant shifts in the external environment, such as a change in one's physical surroundings. In this review, we argue for a fundamental extension of this research field to also encompass internal state changes as playing a key role in structuring event memory. Accordingly, we propose an expanded taxonomy of event boundary-triggering processes, and review behavioral and neuroscience research on internal state changes in three core domains: affective states, goal states, and motivational states. Finally, we evaluate how well current theoretical frameworks can accommodate the unique and interactive contributions of internal states to event memory. We conclude that a theoretical perspective on event memory that integrates both external environment and internal state changes allows for a more complete understanding of how the brain structures experiences, with important implications for future research in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday life is composed of events organized by changes in contexts, with each event containing an unfolding sequence of occurrences. A major challenge facing our memory systems is how to integrate sequential occurrences within events while also maintaining their details and avoiding over-integration across different contexts. We asked if and how distinct hippocampal subfields come to hierarchically and, in parallel, represent both event context and subevent occurrences with learning. Female and male human participants viewed sequential events defined as sequences of objects superimposed on shared color frames while undergoing high-resolution fMRI. Importantly, these events were repeated to induce learning. Event segmentation, as indexed by increased reaction times at event boundaries, was observed in all repetitions. Temporal memory decisions were quicker for items from the same event compared to across different events, indicating that events shaped memory. With learning, hippocampal CA3 multivoxel activation patterns clustered to reflect the event context, with more clustering correlated with behavioral facilitation during event transitions. In contrast, in the dentate gyrus (DG), temporally proximal items that belonged to the same event became associated with more differentiated neural patterns. A computational model explained these results by dynamic inhibition in the DG. Additional similarity measures support the notion that CA3 clustered representations reflect shared voxel populations, while DG's distinct item representations reflect different voxel populations. These findings suggest an interplay between temporal differentiation in the DG and attractor dynamics in CA3. They advance our understanding of how knowledge is structured through integration and separation across time and context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within‐event integration and between‐event differentiation processes that organize events according to their contextual similarities and differences, respectively. Within‐event integration and between‐event differentiation are hypothesized to differentially rely on binding and control processes, which may develop at different ages. To test this hypothesis, 5‐ to 12‐year‐olds and adults (N = 134) studied quartets of image pairs that contained either the same scene (same‐context) or different scenes (different‐context). Participants remembered same‐context items as occurring closer in time by older childhood (7–9 years), whereas different‐context items were remembered as occurring farther apart by early adolescence (10–12 years). The differential emergence of these temporal memory biases suggests within‐event integration and between‐event differentiation emerge at different ages. Research Highlights: Children are less likely than adults to use contextual information (e.g., location) to organize their continuous experience in memory, as indicated by temporal memory biases.Biases reflecting within‐event integration (i.e., remembering elements with a shared context as occurring closer together in time) emerged in late childhood.Biases reflecting between‐event differentiation (i.e., remembering elements from different contexts as occurring farther apart in time) emerged in early adolescence.The differential emergence of biases reflecting within‐event integration and between‐event differentiation suggests they are distinct, yet complementary, processes that support developmental improvements in event memory organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans organise their social worlds into social and nonsocial events. Social event segmentation refers to the ability to parse the environmental content into social and nonsocial events or units. Here, we investigated the role that perceptual information from visual and auditory modalities, in isolation and in conjunction, played in social event segmentation. Participants viewed a video clip depicting an interaction between two actors and marked the boundaries of social and nonsocial events. Depending on the condition, the clip at first contained only auditory or only visual information. Then, the clip was shown containing both auditory and visual information. Higher overall group consensus and response consistency in parsing the clip was found for social segmentation and when both auditory and visual information was available. Presenting the clip in the visual domain only benefitted group agreement in social segmentation while the inclusion of auditory information (under the audiovisual condition) also improved response consistency in nonsocial segmentation. Thus, social segmentation utilises information from the visual modality, with the auditory cues contributing under ambiguous or uncertain conditions and during segmentation of nonsocial content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal stability and change in neutral contexts can transform continuous experiences into distinct and memorable events. However, less is known about how shifting emotional states influence these memory processes, despite ample evidence that emotion impacts non-temporal aspects of memory. Here, we examined if emotional stimuli influence temporal memory for recent event sequences. Participants encoded lists of neutral images while listening to auditory tones. At regular intervals within each list, participants heard emotional positive, negative, or neutral sounds, which served as “emotional event boundaries” that divided each sequence into discrete events. Temporal order memory was tested for neutral item pairs that either spanned an emotional sound or were encountered within the same auditory event. Encountering a highly arousing event boundary led to faster response times for items encoded within the next event. Critically, we found that highly arousing sounds had different effects on binding ongoing versus ensuing sequential representations in memory. Specifically, highly arousing sounds were significantly more likely to enhance temporal order memory for ensuing information compared to information that spanned those boundaries, especially for boundaries with negative valence. These findings suggest that within aversive emotional contexts, fluctuations in arousal help shape the temporal organisation of events in memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the effect of event segmentation on cognitive control mode use in a sample of older adults (N = 30; Mage = 73, SDage = 4.75) using a modified AX-Continuous Performance Test (AX-CPT). This task included a perceptual event boundary between each cue and its forthcoming probe by means of a spatial shift across the left and right side of the display. Past research showed that young adults' existing proactive control bias could be enhanced in an event segmented AX-CPT relative to their performance on a standard AX-CPT. For older adults who adopt reactive control by default, the event boundary was expected to impede cue-reactivation during probe presentation, and thus further enhance their existing reactive control bias. To examine this, older adults were tested with a standard and an event segmented AX-CPT in two blocks, with error rates revealing a shift toward greater reactive control use in the event segmented relative to the standard AX-CPT. Findings supported our hypothesis that placing a spatial event boundary between each cue and forthcoming probe would further enhance older adults' reactive control bias. This study contributes to the sparse but growing literature on the effects of task-specific manipulations on cognitive control use. The results are discussed in light of the dual mechanisms of control framework and the event horizon model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider inference problems for high‐dimensional (HD) functional data with a dense number of T repeated measurements taken for a large number of p variables from a small number of n experimental units. The spatial and temporal dependence, high dimensionality, and dense number of repeated measurements pose theoretical and computational challenges. This paper has two aims; our first aim is to solve the theoretical and computational challenges in testing equivalence among covariance matrices from HD functional data. The second aim is to provide computationally efficient and tuning‐free tools with guaranteed stochastic error control. The weak convergence of the stochastic process formed by the test statistics is established under the "large p, large T, and small n" setting. If the null is rejected, we further show that the locations of the change points can be estimated consistently. The estimator's rate of convergence is shown to depend on the data dimension, sample size, number of repeated measurements, and signal‐to‐noise ratio. We also show that our proposed computation algorithms can significantly reduce the computation time and are applicable to real‐world data with a large number of HD‐repeated measurements (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data). Simulation results demonstrate both the finite sample performance and computational effectiveness of our proposed procedures. We observe that the empirical size of the test is well controlled at the nominal level, and the locations of multiple change points can be accurately identified. An application to fMRI data demonstrates that our proposed methods can identify event boundaries in the preface of the television series Sherlock. Code to implement the procedures is available in an R package named TechPhD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We encounter the world as a continuous flow and effortlessly segment sequences of events into episodes. This process of event segmentation engages working memory (WM) for tracking the flow of events and impacts subsequent memory accuracy. WM is limited in how much information (i.e., WM capacity) and for how long the information is retained (i.e., forgetting rate). In this study, across multiple tasks, we estimated participants' WM capacity and forgetting rate in a dynamic context and evaluated their relationship to event segmentation. A U-shaped relationship across tasks shows that individuals who segmented the movie more finely or coarsely than the average have a faster WM forgetting rate. A separate task assessing long-term memory retrieval revealed that the coarse-segmenters have better recognition of temporal order of events compared to the fine-segmenters. These findings show that event segmentation employs dissociable memory strategies and correlates with how long information is retained in WM.

Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) posits that understanding picture stories depends upon a coordination of two processes: (1) integrating new information into the current event model that is coherent with it (i.e., mapping) and (2) segmenting experiences into distinct event models (i.e., shifting). In two experiments, we investigated competing hypotheses regarding how viewers coordinate the mapping process of bridging inference generation and the shifting process of event segmentation by manipulating the presence/absence of Bridging Action pictures (i.e., creating coherence gaps) in wordless picture stories. The Computational Effort Hypothesis says that experiencing a coherence gap prompts event segmentation and the additional computational effort to generate bridging inferences. Thus, it predicted a positive relationship between event segmentation and explanations when Bridging Actions were absent. Alternatively, the Coherence Gap Resolution Hypothesis says that experiencing a coherence gap prompt generating a bridging inference to close the gap, which obviates segmentation. Thus, it predicted a negative relationship between event segmentation and the production of explanations. Replicating prior work, viewers were more likely to segment and generate explanations when Bridging Action pictures were absent than when they were present. Crucially, the relationship between explanations and segmentation was negative when Bridging Action pictures were absent, consistent with the Coherence Gap Resolution Hypothesis. Unexpectedly, the relationship was positive when Bridging Actions were present. The results are consistent with SPECT’s assumption that mapping and shifting processes are coordinated, but how they are coordinated depends upon the experience of a coherence gap.

We perceive the world in a continuum but remember our past as discrete episodic events. Dominant models of event segmentation suggest that prediction errors or contextual changes are the driving factors that parse continuous experiences into segmented events. These models propose working memory to hold a critical role in event segmentation, yet the particular functioning of working memory that underlies segmented episodic memories remains unclear. Here, we first review the literature regarding the factors that result in the segmentation of episodic memories. Next, we discuss the role of working memory under two possible models regarding how it represents information within each event and suggest experimental predictions. Clarifying the contributions of working memory to event segmentation is important to improve our understanding of the structure of episodic memories.

In unrelated sign languages event structure is reflected in the dynamic form of verbs, and hearing non-signers are known to be able to recognise these visual event structures. This study assessed the time course of neural processing mechanisms in non-signers to examine the pathways for incorporation of physical-perceptual motion features into the linguistic system. In an EEG study, hearing non-signers classified telic/atelic verb signs (two-choice lexical decision task). The ERP effects reflect differences in perceptual processing of verb types (early anterior ERP effects) and integration of perceptual and linguistic processing required by the task (later posterior ERP effects). Non-signers appear to segment signed input into discrete events as they try to map the sign to a linguistic concept. This might indicate the potential pathway for co-optation of perceptual features into the linguistic structure of sign languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experience the world in terms of both (continuous) time and (discrete) events, but time seems especially primitive--since we cannot perceive events without an underlying temporal medium. It is all the more intriguing, then, to discover that event segmentation can itself influence howwe perceive the passage of time. We demonstrated this using a novel "rhythmic reproduction" task, in which people listened to irregular sequences of musical tones, and then immediately reproduced those rhythmic patterns from memory. Each sequence contained a single salient (and entirely task-irrelevant) perceptual event boundary, but the temporal placement of that boundary varied acrossmultiple trials in which people reproduced the same underlying rhythmic pattern. Reproductions were systematically influenced by event boundaries in two complementary ways: tones immediately following event boundarieswere delayed (being effectively played "too late" in the reproductions), while tones immediately preceding event boundaries were sped up (being effectively played "too early"). This demonstrates how event segmentation influences time perception in subtle and nonuniform ways that go beyond global temporal distortions--with dilation across events, but contraction within events. Events structure temporal experience, facilitating a give-and-take between the subjective expansion and contraction of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing stream of sensory experience is so complex and ever‐changing that we tend to parse this experience at "event boundaries," which structures and strengthens memory. Memory processes undergo profound change across early childhood. Whether young children also divide their ongoing processing along event boundaries, and if those boundaries relate to memory, could provide important insight into the development of memory systems. In Study 1, 4–7‐year‐old children and adults segmented a cartoon, and we tested their memory. Children's event boundaries were more variable than adults' and differed in location and consistency of agreement. Older children's event segmentation was more adult‐like than younger children's, and children who segmented events more like adults had better memory for those events. In Study 2, we asked whether these developmental differences in event segmentation had their roots in distinct neural representations. A separate group of 4–8‐year‐old children watched the same cartoon while undergoing an fMRI scan. In the right hippocampus, greater pattern dissimilarity across event boundaries compared to within events was evident for both child and adult behavioral boundaries, suggesting children and adults share similar event cognition. However, the boundaries identified by a data‐driven Hidden Markov Model found that a different brain region—the left and right angular gyrus—aligned only with event boundaries defined by children. Overall, these data suggest that children's event cognition is reasonably well‐developed by age 4 but continues to become more adult‐like across early childhood. Research Highlights: Adults naturally break their experience into events, which structures and strengthens memory, but less is known about children's event perception and memory.Study 1 had adults and children segment and remember events from an animated show, and Study 2 compared those segmentations to other children's fMRI data.Children show better recognition and temporal order memory and more adult‐like event segmentation with age, and children who segment more like adults have better memory.Children's and adults' behavioral boundaries mapped onto pattern similarity differences in hippocampus, and children's behavioral boundaries matched a data‐driven model's boundaries in angular gyrus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that both adults and children organize familiar activity into discrete units with consistent boundaries, despite the dynamic, continuous nature of everyday experiences. However, less is known about how observers segment unfamiliar event sequences. In the current study, we took advantage of the novelty that is inherent in modern dance. Modern dance features natural human motion but does not contain canonical goals—therefore, observers cannot recruit prior goal‐related knowledge to segment it. Our main aims were to identify whether observers segment modern dance into the steps intended by the dancers, and what types of cues contribute to segmentation under these circumstances. Experiment 1 used a classic event segmentation task and found that adults were able to consistently identify only a few of the dancers' intended steps. Experiment 2 tested adults in an offline labeling task. Results showed that steps which could more easily be labeled offline in Experiment 2 were more likely to be segmented online in Experiment 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on higher-level thought has revealed many principles of reasoning and decision-making but has rarely made contact with how we perceive the world in the first place. Here we show how a lower-level property of perception--the spontaneous and task-irrelevant segmentation of continuous visual stimulation into discrete events--can restrict one of the most notorious biases in decision-making: numerical anchoring. Subjects walked down a long room in an immersive three dimensional (3D) animation and then made a numerical judgment (e.g., of how much a suitcase is worth, or of how many hours of community service a minor crime deserved). Critically, some subjects passed through a doorway (a visual event boundary) during their virtual walk, while others did not--equating time, distance traveled, and visual complexity. The anchoring manipulation was especially innocuous, not appearing to be part of the experiment at all. Before the online trial began, subjects reported the two-digit numerical value from a visually distorted "CAPTCHA" ("to verify that you are human")--where this task-irrelevant anchor was either low (e.g., 29) or high (e.g., 92). With no doorway, we observed reliable anchoring effects: Higher CAPTCHA values produced higher estimates. With the doorway, however, such effects were attenuated or even eliminated. This generalized across tasks involving item valuations, factual questions, and legal judgments and in tests of both incidental and explicit anchoring. This demonstrates how spontaneous visual event segmentation can have profound consequences for higher-level thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our daily lives unfold continuously, yet our memories are organised into distinct events, situated in a specific context of space and time, and chunked when this context changes (at event boundaries). Previous research showed that this process, termed event segmentation, enhances object-context binding but impairs temporal order memory. Physiologically, peaks in pupil dilation index event segmentation, similar to emotion-induced bursts of autonomic arousal. Emotional arousal also modulates object-context binding and temporal order memory. Yet, these two critical factors have not been systematically studied together. To address this gap, we ran a behavioural experiment using a paradigm validated to study event segmentation and extended it with emotion manipulation. During encoding, we sequentially presented greyscale objects embedded in coloured frames (colour changes defining events), with a neutral or aversive sound. During retrieval, we tested participants’ memory of temporal order memory and object-colour binding. We found opposite effects of emotion and event segmentation on episodic memory. While event segmentation enhanced object-context binding, emotion impaired it. On the contrary, event segmentation impaired temporal order memory, but emotion enhanced it. These findings increase our understanding of episodic memory organisation in laboratory settings, and potentially in real life with perceptual changes and emotion fluctuations constantly interacting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ADHD and anxiety present high comorbidity, including symptom overlap and related diagnostic and treatment challenges. The current study aimed to extend this area of research by investigating the event segmentation patterns of those with ADHD and anxiety symptoms. Event segmentation is the process of parsing a continuous flow of information into meaningful events, providing the opportunity to examine similarities and differences in how these groups organize their perception of daily experiences. Participants performed an event segmentation task consisting of watching four short movies and identifying large and small events. We used the total number of button presses and segmentation agreement scores in a multivariate analysis, and results indicated that the High ADHD group identified significantly more events in the large condition than the High Anxiety group and had significantly higher agreement scores than the Comorbid group. This study furthers our understanding of the cognitive overlap of ADHD and anxiety symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the time series of prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual input arrives in a continuous stream, but we often experience the world as a sequence of discrete events — and the boundaries between events have important consequences for our mental lives. Perhaps the best example of this is that memory not only declines as a function of elapsed time, but is also impaired when crossing an event boundary — as when walking through a doorway. (This impairment may be adaptive, as when one "flushes" a cache in a computer program when completing a function.) But when exactly does this impairment occur? Existing work has not asked this question: based on a reasonable assumption that forgetting occurs when we cross event boundaries, memory has only been tested after this point. Here we demonstrate that even visual cues to an impending event boundary (that one has not yet crossed) suffice to trigger forgetting. Subjects viewed an immersive animation that simulated walking through a room. Before their walk, they saw a list of pseudo-words, and immediately after their walk, their recognition memory was tested. During their walk, some subjects passed through a doorway, while others did not (equating time and distance traveled). Memory was impaired (relative to the "no doorway" condition) not only when they passed through the doorway, but also when they were tested just before they would have crossed the doorway. Additional controls confirmed that this was due to the anticipation of event boundaries (rather than differential surprise or visual complexity). Visual processing may proactively "flush" memory to some degree in preparation for future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To study complex human activity and how it is perceived and remembered, it is valuable to have large-scale, well-characterized stimuli that are representative of such activity. We present the Multi-angle Extended Three-dimensional Activities (META) stimulus set, a structured and highly instrumented set of extended event sequences performed in naturalistic settings. Performances were captured with two color cameras and a Kinect v2 camera with color and depth sensors, allowing the extraction of three-dimensional skeletal joint positions. We tracked the positions and identities of objects for all chapters using a mixture of manual coding and an automated tracking pipeline, and hand-annotated the timings of high-level actions. We also performed an online experiment to collect normative event boundaries for all chapters at a coarse and fine grain of segmentation, which allowed us to quantify event durations and agreement across participants. We share these materials publicly to advance new discoveries in the study of complex naturalistic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and spatial memory paradigms. Here we adapt these paradigms to test the role of speaker regularity for event segmentation of complex auditory information. The results of our auditory paradigm replicate the findings in other sensory modalities—finding greater within-event temporal memory for items within speaker-bound events and greater source memory for items at speaker or event transitions. The task we use significantly extends the ecological validity of past paradigms by allowing participants to encode the stimuli without any suggestions on the part of the experimenter. This unique property of our design reveals that, while memory performance is strongly dependent on self-reported mnemonic strategy, behavioral effects associated with event segmentation are robust to changes in mnemonic strategy. Finally, we consider the effect of serial position on segmentation effects during encoding and present a modeling approach to estimate the independent contribution of event segmentation. These findings provide several lines of evidence suggesting that contextual stability in perceptual features drives segmentation during word listening and supports a modality-independent role for mechanisms involved in event segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called event segmentation. Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD.

We experience the world as a continuous flow of information but segment it into discrete events in long-term memory. As a result, younger adults are more likely to recall details of an event when cued with information from the same event (within-event cues) than from the prior event (between-event cues), suggesting that stronger associations are formed within events than across event boundaries. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of age and working memory updating on this within > between cued-recall effect and the consequences for subsequent memory. Across two studies, participants viewed two different films (Hitchcock's Bang You're Dead and BBC's Sherlock). They were later shown clips taken from either the beginning/middle (within-event cues) or end (between-event cues) of a scene and asked to recall what happened next in the film. While the main effect of age was not significant in either experiment, overall memory performance related to the within > between effect in older, but not younger, adults. Low-performing older adults showed less of a difference in cued recall for within- and between-event cues than high performers. In Study 2, better two-back task performance also related to a greater within > between effect in older, but not younger, adults, suggesting that working memory updating relates to the distinctiveness of events stored in long-term memory, at least in older adults. Taken together, these findings suggest that age differences in event memory are not inevitable and may critically depend on one's ability update working memory at event boundaries. Public Significance Statement: Everyday events, which we experience continuously, are stored in long-term memory as a series of units (e.g., eating breakfast, driving to work). Dividing experiences into distinct events is thought to involve refreshing what we have in mind when the situation changes. In this study, we find that older adults with poor refreshing ability seem to blur events together in long-term memory and this affects their ability to recall what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of experiences into meaningful events and memories is intertwined with the notion of time. Temporal perception can influence, and be influenced by, segmenting continuous experience into meaningful events. Episodic memories formed from these events become associated with temporal information as well. However, it is less clear how temporal perception contributes to structuring events and organizing memory: whether it plays a more active or passive role, and whether this temporal information is encoded initially during perception or influenced by retrieval processes. To address these questions, we examined how event segmentation influences temporal representations during initial perception and memory retrieval, without testing temporal information explicitly. Using a neural measure of temporal context extracted from scalp electroencephalography in human participants (N= 170), we found reduced temporal context similarity between studied items separated by an event boundary when compared to items from the same event. Furthermore, while participants freely recalled list items, neural activity reflected reinstatement of temporal context representations from the study phase, including temporal disruption. A computational model of episodic memory, the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) model, predicted these results, and made novel predictions regarding the influence of temporal disruption on recall order. These findings implicate the impact of event structure on memory organization via temporal representations, underscoring the role of temporal information in event segmentation and episodic memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perceive our environment by breaking it down intosegments known as events. Event segmentation influencesmemory by enhancing the retention of information atboundaries as compared to information that is contained withinthe boundaries of an event (the event boundary advantage).This effect has been attributed to changes in attention duringperception of events. Prior studies have demonstrated greaterattention while perceiving event boundaries but have failed todemonstrate attention as the underlying mechanism for theevent-boundary advantage. Two behavioral experiments wereconducted to investigate, a) whether the event boundaryadvantage is observed even for events that are perceived whileperforming a concurrent task? and b) Is there a decrease in theboundary advantage when the concurrent task complexity isincreased? In both experiments, participants watched videosrelated to performance of daily tasks, while simultaneouslyperforming a probe detection task; either a simple dot detection(Experiment 1) or a go/ no-go task (Experiment 2). The probewas presented either at an event boundary or at pre-definednon-boundary time point and the memory for both temporallocations was measured after the completion of the detectiontask. A mixed effects logistic regression revealed an interactiveeffect for both detection accuracy and the boundary advantage;probe detection at event boundaries remained unaffectedthroughout an event irrespective of the level of the taskcomplexity while, contrary to prediction, a boundary advantagein memory was also observed. But detection and memoryaccuracy for non-boundaries decreased successively for bothlow and high secondary task complexity suggesting greaterinterference for processing non-boundary information. Theseresults indicate that greater attention may not be the onlypredictor of better memory for event boundaries as postulatedby Event Segmentation theory.

Current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that memory abnormalities are central to the development and persistence of symptoms. While the most notable memory disturbances in PTSD involve memory for the trauma itself, individuals often have trouble remembering aspects of everyday life. Further, people with PTSD may have difficulty segmenting ongoing activity into discrete units, which is important for our perception and later memory of the activity. The current study investigated whether PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity predicted event segmentation and memory for everyday activities. To do so, 63 people with PTSD and 64 controls with a trauma history watched, segmented, and recalled videos of everyday activities. Viewers with higher PTSD symptom severity showed lower agreement on locations of event boundaries and recalled fewer fine-grained actions than did those with lower symptom severity. These results suggest that PTSD symptoms alter event segmentation, which may contribute to subsequent memory disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does it take less time to remember an event than to experience it? Recent evidence suggests that the dynamic unfolding of events is temporally compressed in memory representations, but the exact nature of this compression mechanism remains unclear. The present study tested two possible mechanisms. First, it could be that memories compress the course of events into a sequence of moments or slices of prior experience, while omitting other segments, akin to edited films that give condensed accounts of events using sequences of separate shots (referred to as the discontinuity hypothesis). Alternatively, it may be that the entire stream of information is represented but is mentally replayed at a faster speed than the original experience (referred to as the acceleration hypothesis). In two experiments, these hypotheses were tested by comparing mental replay times for continuous movies depicting naturalistic events and edited versions of the same movies in which less informative parts were removed to mimic the presumed structure of memory representations according to the discontinuity hypothesis. We found that memories for videos in which less informative segments were replaced by temporal ellipses (Experiment 1) or by black screens of the same duration as removed segments (Experiment 2) were less compressed and contained a higher density of recalled units than did memories for complete videos. These results support the discontinuity hypothesis and suggest that segments of time that are redundant and predictable are omitted in episodic memory, while more informative segments are selectively retained to represent the unfolding of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called event segmentation. Here, we investigated the causal relationship between event segmentation and memory by cueing event boundaries and evaluating its effect on subsequent memory in people with PTSD. People with PTSD (n = 38) and trauma-matched controls (n = 36) watched and remembered videos of everyday activities that were either unedited, contained visual and auditory cues at event boundaries, or contained visual and auditory cues at event middles. PTSD symptom severity varied substantial within both the group with a PTSD diagnosis and the control group. Memory performance did not differ significantly between groups, but people with high symptoms of PTSD remembered fewer details from the videos than those with lower symptoms of PTSD. Both those with PTSD and controls remembered more information from the videos in the event boundary cue condition than the middle cue or unedited conditions. This finding has important implications for translational work focusing on addressing everyday memory complaints in people with PTSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A core characteristic of auditory stimuli is that they develop over time. Referring to the event segmentation theory, we assume that the on- and offset of a contextual sound indicates the start and end of an event. As a consequence, stimuli and responses appearing within a common auditory context may be integrated more likely/strongly, forming so-called event files, than those appearing in different auditory contexts. In two experiments, this hypothesis was tested using the negative priming paradigm and the distractor–response binding paradigm. In prime–probe presentations, participants identified target sounds via keypresses while ignoring distractor sounds. Additional sine tones acted as the context in the prime, whereas the probe context was silence. In the common context condition, the context started with the prime sounds and ended with the prime response. In the changing context condition, the context started with the prime sounds but changed to another tone after the offset of the prime sounds. Results from both experiments revealed a larger stimulus–response binding effect in the common than in the changing context condition. We conducted a control experiment to test the alternative account of contextual similarity between the prime and the probe. Together, our results suggest that common context can temporally segment stimuli and responses into event files, providing evidence of common context as a binding principle. Public Significance Statement: Humans are exposed to a continuous stream of information, but experience and remember structured temporal units called events. Given the pronounced temporal characteristic of auditory stimuli, the on- and offset of these stimuli may support the segmentation of events. The current study investigated this in a micro view: whether stimuli and responses occurring with the same background sound (compared to occurring with different background sounds) are more likely or strongly processed as belonging to the same event. Results showed that the on- and offset of a background sound can demarcate the integration window of event files, which are transient representations of stimulus–response episodes. The findings further suggest that sharing contextual information is one principle for stimuli and responses to be integrated into a common event file representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that domain knowledge facilitates memory for domain-specific information through two mechanisms: differentiation, which involves the ability to identify meaningful, fine-grained details within a sequence, and unitization, which involves binding individual components from a sequence into functional wholes. This study investigated the extent to which individuals engaged in differentiation and unitization when parsing continuous events into discrete, meaningful units (i.e., event segmentation) and recalling them. Participants watched and segmented basketball videos. They then rewatched the videos and provided descriptions afterward. Videos were coded for the presence of higher order goals (A2 actions) and the individual sub-actions that comprised them (A1 actions). Results suggested that event segmentation behavior for participants with less knowledge was more aligned with changes in basic actions (A1 actions) than for participants with greater knowledge. When describing events, participants with greater knowledge were more likely than participants with less knowledge to use statements that reflected unitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People spontaneously divide everyday experience into smaller units (event segmentation). To measure event segmentation, studies typically ask participants to explicitly mark the boundaries between events as they watch a movie (segmentation task). Their data may then be used to infer how others are likely to segment the same movie. However, significant variability in performance across individuals could undermine the ability to generalize across groups, especially as more research moves online. To address this concern, we used several widely employed and novel measures to quantify segmentation agreement across different sized groups (n = 2–32) using data collected on different platforms and movie types (in-lab & commercial film vs. online & everyday activities). All measures captured nonrandom and video-specific boundaries, but with notable between-sample variability. Samples of 6–18 participants were required to reliably detect video-driven segmentation behavior within a single sample. As sample size increased, agreement values improved and eventually stabilized at comparable sample sizes for in-lab & commercial film data and online & everyday activities data. Stabilization occurred at smaller sample sizes when measures reflected (1) agreement between two groups versus agreement between an individual and group, and (2) boundary identification between small (fine-grained) rather than large (coarse-grained) events. These analyses inform the tailoring of sample sizes based on the comparison of interest, materials, and data collection platform. In addition to demonstrating the reliability of online and in-lab segmentation performance at moderate sample sizes, this study supports the use of segmentation data to infer when events are likely to be segmented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper digests a recent body of empirical work on narrative imaginings to music, bringing them into dialogue with existing theoretical frameworks. By examining the stories imagined at three geographic locations using various methods, these studies present converging evidence that intuitive imaginings to music can be strikingly similar across individuals, but only when they share a cultural background. The intersubjectivity of these imaginings extends not just to the stories’ content, but also to their dynamic event structure as imagined to unfold across the time course of the music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Current theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that memory abnormalities are central to the development and persistence of symptoms. While the most notable memory disturbances in PTSD involve memory for the trauma itself, individuals often have trouble remembering aspects of everyday life. Further, people with PTSD may have difficulty segmenting ongoing activity into discrete units, which is important for our perception and later memory of the activity. The current study investigated whether PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity predicted event segmentation and memory for everyday activities. To do so, 63 people with PTSD and 64 controls with a trauma history watched, segmented, and recalled videos of everyday activities. Viewers with higher PTSD symptom severity showed lower agreement on locations of event boundaries and recalled fewer fine-grained actions than did those with lower symptom severity. These results suggest that PTSD symptoms alter event segmentation, which may contribute to subsequent memory disturbances.

A fundamental aspect of human experience is that it is segmented into discrete events. This may be underpinned by transitions between distinct neural states. Using an innovative data-driven state segmentation method, we investigate how neural states are organized across the cortical hierarchy and where in the cortex neural state boundaries and perceived event boundaries overlap. Our results show that neural state boundaries are organized in a temporal cortical hierarchy, with short states in primary sensory regions, and long states in lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. State boundaries are shared within and between groups of brain regions that resemble well-known functional networks. Perceived event boundaries overlap with neural state boundaries across large parts of the cortical hierarchy, particularly when those state boundaries demarcate a strong transition or are shared between brain regions. Taken together, these findings suggest that a partially nested cortical hierarchy of neural states forms the basis of event segmentation.

In this article, I will consider the specificity of narrative in VR from the perspective of its embodied, spatial, and participatory nature. For this purpose, I will look at storytelling in VR from a neurofilmological perspective that accounts for both the cognitive and phenomenological and conceptualizes the viewer as an organism, applying an integrative view. I will probe several ideas from cognitive sciences and phenomenological cinema and media studies in order to support the above understanding of narrative in VR. I will apply these theories and ideas to specific VR case studies: Book of Distance (Randall Okita, 2019), Heterotopias (Noa Kaplan and Szilvia Ruszev, 2018), and Carne y Arena (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2017). Finally, this article will discuss the terms “ambient storytelling” (Stein and Fisher 2013), “somatic montage” (Waite 2016), and “embodied narrative” (a term used in cognitive sciences) and their relevance concerning narrative in VR.

We present a computational model that can learn event tax-onomies online from the continuous sensorimotor informationflow perceived by an agent while interacting with its environ-ment. Our model implements two fundamental learning bi-ases. First, it learns probabilistic event models as temporal sen-sorimotor forward models and event transition models, whichpredict event model transitions given particular perceptual cir-cumstances. Second, learning is based on the principle of min-imizing free energy, which is further biased towards the detec-tion of free energy transients. As a result, the algorithm formsconceptual structures that encode events and event boundaries.We show that event taxonomies can emerge when the algo-rithm is run on multiple levels of precision. Moreover, weshow that generally any type of forward model can be used,as long as it learns sufficiently fast. Finally, we show that thedeveloped structures can be used to hierarchically plan goal-directed behavior by means of active inference.

How does the representation of naturalistic life events change with age? Here, we analyzed fMRI data from 414 children and adolescents (5–19 years) as they watched a narrative movie. In addition to changes in the degree of inter-subject correlation (ISC) with age in sensory and medial parietal regions, we used a novel measure (between-group ISC) to reveal age-related shifts in the responses across the majority of the neocortex. Over the course of development, brain responses became more discretized into stable and coherent events and shifted earlier in time to anticipate upcoming perceived event transitions, measured behaviorally in an age-matched sample. However, hippocampal responses to event boundaries actually decreased with age, suggesting a shifting division of labor between episodic encoding processes and schematic event representations between the ages of 5 and 19.