The clinical importance of understanding and improving everyday cognition in older adults

First-person spoken narratives elicit consistent event structures in the angular gyrus

Event segmentation theory explains how we parse a stream of continuous information into meaningful event models. Narratives are useful stimuli for studying this phenomenon, as the flow of information and the way we make meaning of them mirrors how we comprehend and make sense of our daily lives. Many studies have investigated the segmentation of audiovisual stimuli, such as movies, but only a handful of studies focused on how the brain parses auditory-only narrative. Using two stories with rich narrative features, we asked participants to listen to the story-recordings while being scanned with fMRI. We then recruited two separate groups of behavioral participants to parse the stories, either via transcript (visual-only) or recording (audio-only). Annotated boundaries from the two modalities were analyzed and used as behavioral benchmarks for the neural-behavioral comparison of event structures. We examined four regions of interest (angular gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, early auditory cortex, and early visual cortex) and found that only the angular gyrus produced neural event structures that significantly matched with the behavioral event structures across both modalities and both stories. Our results indicate that activity in the angular gyrus is associated with the neural processes involved in parsing continuous narratives, particularly when these narratives are audio-only and contain ambiguous event transitions, rather than with changes in sensory-related features.

Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action

Mental representations of everyday experience are rich, structured, and multimodal. In this article we consider the adaptive pressures that led to human construction of such representations, arguing that structured event representations enable cognitive systems to more effectively predict the trajectory of naturalistic everyday activity. We propose an account of how cortical systems and the hippocampus (HPC) interact to construct, maintain, and update event representations. This analysis throws light on recent research on story comprehension, event segmentation, episodic memory, and action planning. It also suggests how the growing science base can be deployed to diagnose impairments in event perception and memory, and to improve memory for everyday events.