Event Perception and Memory

Object persistence explains event completion

Our minds consistently distort memories of objects and events. Oftentimes, these distortions serve to transform incoherent memories into coherent ones, as when we misremember partial events as whole ("event completion"). What mechanisms drive these distortions? Whereas extant work shows that representations of causality, continuity, familiarity, physical coherence, or event coherence create memory distortions, we suggest that a simpler and more fundamental mechanism may be at play: object persistence. Merely seeing an object take part in an event can create a persisting memory of its presence throughout that event. In 8 pre-registered experiments (N = 317 adults), participants performed a simple task where they watched an animation, then chose whether or not a frame from the animation contained an object. Participants falsely remembered seeing an object when it was not there (E1). These effects persisted in the absence of causality (E2), continuity (E3), event familiarity (E4), object familiarity (E5), even when the events violated physical laws (E6), and when the events themselves were not coherent (E7). However, the effect disappeared when we abolished object persistence (E8). Thus, object persistence alone creates rich, enduring, and coherent representations of objects and events.

Negative emotion reduces the temporal compression of events in episodic memory

Recent studies have revealed that the continuous flow of information that characterises naturalistic events is temporally compressed in episodic memory, so that remembering an event generally takes less time than the duration of the past episode. However, the specific characteristics of an event that influence its temporal compression in memory remain poorly understood. In the present study, we examined the extent to which the negative valence of events impacts their rate of compression in memory representations. We conducted two experiments in which participants were instructed to mentally replay a series of videos depicting negative or neutral events. The results showed that the time taken to mentally replay a video, relative to the actual video duration, was significantly longer for negative than for neutral videos. These results suggest that negative emotion increases the sampling rate of units of experience that represent the course of events, leading to a lower compression of events in memory representations.

Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure

Though everyday life is continuous, people understand and remember experiences as discrete events separated by boundaries. Event boundaries influence the temporal structure of memory, and have been proposed to enhance encoding of boundary-adjacent information. However, the extent to which event boundaries influence memory for specific items, and their effect on memory in interactive environments are not well understood. Here, we designed a task to test how boundaries between hidden rules and uncertainty about those rules affect free recall of item-level information. Participants (n = 66) responded to a sequence of individual word stimuli, with words grouped by hidden rules forming events, and abrupt shifts between rules causing event boundaries. Afterwards, participants freely recalled words from the task. Recall was clustered based on event structure, such that words from the same discrete event tended to be recalled together. Contrary to predictions of theories of event cognition, recall was worse for words encoded immediately after event boundaries. Finally, we used a reinforcement-learning model to characterize recall performance, allowing us to infer a positive relationship between decision certainty and recall success. These findings indicate that the structure of events and inferences made over that structure play important roles in shaping episodic memories.

Neural representations of noncentral events during narrative encoding predict subsequent story ending originality

On the basis of the confluence theories of creativity, creative ideation depends on forging links between existing memory traces. The synergy between memory and creative thought is well-established, but neural dynamics of memory integration for creativity are understudied. Here, we extended the traditional memory paradigm. Participants read, recalled narratives, and wrote endings. Computational linguistic analysis showed that those integrating more noncentral events-those less semantically connected to other events within the narrative-wrote more original endings. Analyzing fMRI data captured during narrative encoding, we discovered that story ending originality can be predicted by shared event representation across participants in the right Brodmann area 25 (BA25) and stronger hippocampal event segmentation signal during noncentral event encoding. These results held across different narrative types (i.e., crime, romance, and fantasy stories). Overall, these results offer notable insights, from the perspective of network structure into how humans encode and retrieve complex real-world experiences to enhance creativity.

Spurious autobiographical memories of psychosis: a dopamine-gated neuroplasticity account for relapse and treatment-resistant psychosis

Psychotic disorders are known to be associated with elevated dopamine synthesis; yet, nondopamine factors may underlie the manifestation of some psychotic symptoms that are nonresponsive to dopamine-blocking agents. One under-explored nondopamine mechanism is neuroplasticity. We propose an account of the course of psychotic symptoms based on the extensive evidence for dopamine facilitation of Hebbian synaptic plasticity in cortical and subcortical memory systems. The encoding of psychotic experiences in autobiographical memory (AM) is expected to be facilitated in the hyperdopaminergic state associated with acute psychosis. However, once such 'spurious AM of psychosis' (SAMP) is encoded, its persistence may become dependent more on synaptic factors than dopamine factors. Under this framework, the involuntary retrieval of residual SAMP is postulated to play a key role in mediating the reactivation of symptoms with similar contents, as often observed in patients during relapse. In contrast, with active new learning of normalizing experiences across diverse real-life contexts, supported by intact dopamine-mediated salience, well-integrated SAMP may undergo 'extinction', leading to remission. The key steps to the integration of SAMP across psychotic and nonpsychotic memories may correspond to one's 'recovery style', involving processes similar to the formation of 'non-believed memory' in nonclinical populations. The oversuppression of dopamine can compromise such processes. We synthesize this line of evidence into an updated dopamine-gated memory framework where neuroplasticity processes offer a parsimonious account for the recurrence, persistence, and progression of psychotic symptoms. This framework generates testable hypotheses relevant to clinical interventions.

Memory updating and the structure of event representations

People form memories of specific events and use those memories to make predictions about similar new experiences. Living in a dynamic environment presents a challenge: How does one represent valid prior events in memory while encoding new experiences when things change? There is evidence for two seemingly contradictory classes of mechanism: One differentiates outdated event features by making them less similar or less accessible than updated event features. The other integrates updated features of new events with outdated memories, and the relationship between them, into a structured representation. Integrative encoding may occur when changed events trigger inaccurate predictions based on remembered prior events. We propose that this promotes subsequent recollection of events and their order, enabling adaptation to environmental changes.

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.

Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions

Content produced for young audiences is structured to present opportunities for learning and social interactions. This research examines multi-scale temporal changes in predictability in Child-directed songs. We developed a technique based on Kolmogorov complexity to quantify the rate of change of textual information content over time. This method was applied to a corpus of 922 English, Spanish, and French publicly available child and adult-directed texts. Child-directed song lyrics (CDSongs) showed overall lower complexity compared to Adult-directed songs (ADsongs), and lower complexity was associated with a higher number of YouTube views. CDSongs showed a relatively higher information rate at the beginning and end compared to ADSongs. CDSongs and ADSongs showed a non-uniform information rate, but these periodic oscillatory patterns were more predictable in CDSongs compared to ADSongs. These findings suggest that the optimal balance between predictability and expressivity in information content differs between child- and adult-directed content, but also changes over timescales to potentially support multiple children's needs.

Temporal integration as an adaptive process in visual perception, attention, and working memory

I propose that temporal integration is ubiquitous in visual perception, because it serves an adaptive role. To support this idea, I draw together evidence from historically separated research fields that target different timescales. At one extreme, this concerns the detection and discrimination of successive stimuli within intervals of less than a quarter of a second. At an intermediate level, associated with attentional episodes, intervals between half a second up to a few seconds are considered. Finally, at the other extreme, this involves high-level, conceptual events across intervals of multiple seconds or even minutes. Across such varying intervals, the nature of temporal integration and the resultant perceptual events are clearly different. I nevertheless propose that temporal integration should be understood as a continuous process that serves a common adaptive goal: To maximize the amount of useful information, at minimal costs, tailored to the observer's current needs and circumstances. Emerging from this viewpoint are several research directions that might be pursued on the topic of temporal integration, and on its consequences for perception and memory.

Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex

Schemas are rich and complex knowledge structures about the typical unfolding of events in a context; for example, a schema of a dinner at a restaurant. In this Perspective, we suggest that reinforcement learning (RL), a computational theory of learning the structure of the world and relevant goal-oriented behaviour, underlies schema learning. We synthesize literature about schemas and RL to offer that three RL principles might govern the learning of schemas: learning via prediction errors, constructing hierarchical knowledge using hierarchical RL, and dimensionality reduction through learning a simplified and abstract representation of the world. We then suggest that the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex is involved in both schemas and RL due to its involvement in dimensionality reduction and in guiding memory reactivation through interactions with posterior brain regions. Last, we hypothesize that the amount of dimensionality reduction might underlie gradients of involvement along the ventral-dorsal and posterior-anterior axes of the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex. More specific and detailed representations might engage the ventral and posterior parts, whereas abstraction might shift representations towards the dorsal and anterior parts of the medial prefrontal cortex.

Sequence chunking through neural encoding of ordinal positions

Grouping sensory events into chunks is an efficient strategy to integrate information across long sequences such as speech, music, and complex movements. Although chunks can be constructed based on diverse cues (e.g., sensory features, statistical patterns, internal knowledge) recent studies have consistently demonstrated that the chunks constructed by different cues are all tracked by low-frequency neural dynamics. Here, I review evidence that chunking cues drive low-frequency activity in modality-dependent networks, which interact to generate chunk-tracking activity in broad brain areas. Functionally, this work suggests that a core computation underlying sequence chunking may assign each event its ordinal position within a chunk and that this computation is causally implemented by chunk-tracking neural activity during predictive sequence chunking.

Neurobiological influences on event perception: the role of catecholamines

BACKGROUND

Event segmentation, the cognitive process of parsing continuous experiences into discrete events, plays a fundamental role in how humans perceive and interact with their environment. Guided by Event Segmentation Theory, this study investigates the modulation of event segmentation by the catecholaminergic system by methylphenidate (MPH).

METHODS

Healthy adult participants (N = 52) engaged in a double-blind, counter-balanced, placebo-controlled experiment in which they watched a movie and identified event boundaries under placebo and MPH conditions.

RESULTS

With the same information given, MPH increased the likelihood that the information was considered meaningful. Crucially, the number of situational changes and participant's prior experience had an interactive effect on the probability of event segmentation. There was a stronger relationship between environmental information and segmentation probability when catecholaminergic levels were elevated by MPH in addition to previous experience.

CONCLUSIONS

The catecholaminergic system modulates how incoming information is segmented to build meaningful episodes. Prior experience supports the effects of MPH to unfold. These findings underscore the complex interplay between neurochemical modulation and cognitive processes involved in event perception.

Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory

Emotional fluctuations are ubiquitous in everyday life, but precisely how they sculpt the temporal organisation of memories remains unclear. Here, we designed a novel task - the Emotion Boundary Task - wherein participants viewed sequences of negative and neutral images surrounded by a colour border. We manipulated perceptual context (border colour), emotional-picture valence, as well as the direction of emotional-valence shifts (i.e., shifts from neutral-to-negative and negative-to-neutral events) to create events with a shared perceptual and/or emotional context. We measured memory for temporal order and temporal distances for images processed within and across events. Negative images processed within events were remembered as closer in time compared to neutral ones. In contrast, temporal distances were remembered as longer for images spanning neutral-to-negative shifts - suggesting temporal dilation in memory with the onset of a negative event following a previously-neutral state. The extent of negative-picture induced temporal dilation in memory correlated with dispositional negativity across individuals. Lastly, temporal order memory was enhanced for recently-presented negative (versus neutral) images. These findings suggest that emotional-state dynamics matters when considering emotion-temporal memory interactions: While persistent negative events may compress subjectively remembered time, dynamic shifts from neutral-to-negative events produce temporal dilation in memory, with implications for adaptive emotional functioning.

Foraging and inertia: Understanding the developmental dynamics of overt visual attention

During early life, we develop the ability to choose what we focus on and what we ignore, allowing us to regulate perception and action in complex environments. But how does this change influence how we spontaneously allocate attention to real-world objects during free behaviour? Here, in this narrative review, we examine this question by considering the time dynamics of spontaneous overt visual attention, and how these develop through early life. Even in early childhood, visual attention shifts occur both periodically and aperiodically. These reorientations become more internally controlled as development progresses. Increasingly with age, attention states also develop self-sustaining attractor dynamics, known as attention inertia, in which the longer an attention episode lasts, the more the likelihood increases of its continuing. These self-sustaining dynamics are driven by amplificatory interactions between engagement, comprehension, and distractibility. We consider why experimental measures show decline in sustained attention over time, while real-world visual attention often demonstrates the opposite pattern. Finally, we discuss multi-stable attention states, where both hypo-arousal (mind-wandering) and hyper-arousal (fragmentary attention) may also show self-sustaining attractor dynamics driven by moment-by-moment amplificatory child-environment interactions; and we consider possible applications of this work, and future directions.

The role of surface and structural similarities in the retrieval of realistic perceptual events

This study investigated whether structural similarities (i.e. abstract frames, e.g. once bitten twice shy) can prevail over surface similarities (i.e. contexts, e.g. restaurant) in driving the retrieval of realistic events involving dynamic, multimodal and perceptually crowded data. After watching an initial set of video clips, participants had to indicate whether a new video clip, that shared surface similarities with an initial event and structural similarities with another one, elicited a retrieval. The results of Experiment 1A showed that retrieval was more likely to be elicited by structural rather than by surface similarities. Experiment 1B confirmed that the surface similarities manipulated in this study were strong enough to elicit substantial retrievals when the competing structural match was neutralized. The pattern of results obtained in Experiment 1A remained unchanged when the number of unrelated video clips within the initial set was increased. The findings suggest that structurally based retrievals still prevail when familiar structures underlie realistic perceptual events. They open new perspectives regarding the settings that promote structurally based retrievals in educational contexts where unfamiliar principles are introduced.

Opposite effects of emotion and event segmentation on temporal order memory and object-context binding

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.

Optimising episodic encoding within segmented virtual contexts

The encoding of episodic memories depends on segmentation; memory performance improves when segmentation is available and performance is impaired when segmentation is absent. Indeed, for episodic memories to be created, the encoding of information into long-term memory requires the experience of event boundaries (i.e., context-shifts defined by salient moments of change between packets of to-be-learned stimuli). According to this view episodic encoding, and therefore learning, is critically dependent on the nature of working memory. Motived by this theoretical framework, here we explore the effects of segmentation on long-term memory performance, investigating the possibility of optimising learning by aligning the presentation of stimuli to the capacity of working memory. Across two experiments, we examined whether manipulating the boundaries between events influences memory. Participants travelled within a virtual environment, with spatial-temporal gaps between virtual locations providing context-shifts to segment sequentially presented lists of words. Both accurate recall and memory for temporal order improve and the number of falsely recalled words reduces when reducing the quantity of information presented between boundaries. Taken together, the present results suggest that closely matching the quantity of information between boundaries to working memory capacity optimises long-term memory performance.

What matters most to the perception of community resilience in Romania?

We aim to measure and explain the perception of community resilience in Romania. We use survey data from a country-representative sample of 1500 respondents. We rely on factor-based partial least squares path modeling to measure five reflective latent constructs from a CCRAM-type questionnaire. We use these constructs to extract a second-order formative latent construct representing an overall measure of community resilience. Next, we use three sub-dimensions of family resilience, along with individual resilience and several control variables to explain community resilience. Among the five sub-dimensions of the overall measure of community resilience, social trust exerts the highest contribution, followed by place attachment. The predictors of community resilience with the largest effect sizes are the three sub-dimensions of family resilience. The policies geared towards increasing community resilience might not be able to address the most important factors, at least in the case of Romania, because they pertain to informal group interaction, and lie outside the reach of formal administrative authority.

Contextualizing predictive minds

The structure of human memory seems to be optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior. We propose that these capacities rely on a tripartite structure of memory that includes concepts, events, and contexts-three layers that constitute the mental world model. We suggest that the mechanism that critically increases adaptivity and flexibility is the tendency to contextualize. This tendency promotes local, context-encoding abstractions, which focus event- and concept-based planning and inference processes on the task and situation at hand. As a result, cognitive contextualization offers a solution to the frame problem-the need to select relevant features of the environment from the rich stream of sensorimotor signals. We draw evidence for our proposal from developmental psychology and neuroscience. Adopting a computational stance, we present evidence from cognitive modeling research which suggests that context sensitivity is a feature that is critical for maximizing the efficiency of cognitive processes. Finally, we turn to recent deep-learning architectures which independently demonstrate how context-sensitive memory can emerge in a self-organized learning system constrained by cognitively-inspired inductive biases.

EPS mid-career prize: An integrated framework for the learning, recognition and interpretation of words

In this article, I review the evidence on the involvement of sleep and consolidation in word learning and processing during language comprehension, focusing on implications for theory. The theoretical basis for the review is a complementary systems account of word learning involving flexible (hippocampal) and stable (cortical) pathways to lexical knowledge. I argue that the accumulated data are consistent with a role for both pathways in both learning and recognition of lexical items, with sleep and consolidation supporting the transfer of recent experience between the pathways. The level of involvement of each pathway is dependent on key factors, such as consistency with prior knowledge in the case of learning, and reliance on context and/or automaticity in the case of recognition. As a consequence, the notion of a mental lexicon cannot really be restricted to just the listener's stable knowledge about words: flexible knowledge and recent experiences are also important. Furthermore, I argue that the flexible pathway plays a critical role even in the absence of new lexical items. The available evidence suggests that this pathway encodes (and potentially consolidates) recent linguistic experiences, providing potential benefits to interpretation of subsequent language and the long-term retention of knowledge. In conclusion, I propose that a dual-pathway account incorporating both flexibility and stability is necessary to explain the learning, recognition, and interpretation of words.

Effects of Language Proficiency on Selective Attention Patterns at Segmenting Boundaries in English Audio Sentences

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES

Normative perceptual segmentation facilitates event perception, comprehension, and memory. Given that native English listeners' normative perceptual segmentation of English speech streams coexists with a highly selective attention pattern at segmentation boundaries, it is significant to test whether Chinese learners of English have a different attention pattern at boundaries, thereby checking whether they perform a normative segmentation.

METHODS

Thirty Chinese learners of English with relatively higher language proficiency (CLH) and 26 with relatively lower language proficiency (CLL) listened to a series of English audio sentences. Meanwhile, they were asked to press the key whenever a phonetic probe "ba" occurred. Response time to "ba" reflects the attention where "ba" is located at segmentation boundaries.

RESULTS

The results revealed that, (1) relative to native English listeners' highly selective attention pattern, the CLH group showed a relatively selective attention pattern, while the CLL group displayed a non-selective attention pattern. (2) Both the CLH group and natives had better recognition memory than the CLL group. (3) Both the CLH group and natives' attention at segmentation boundaries was not correlated with their memory for sentences, while the CLL group's attention at boundaries was correlated with memory.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest that (1) Chinese learners of English did not perform a normative segmentation, which shows the effect of English proficiency on perceptual segmentation; (2) English proficiency has a superior effect on memory for sentences, while perceptual segmentation would come next to support memory by providing structure for memory construction if English proficiency is not high; (3) a comparison of attention patterns between Chinese learners and natives can provide a reference for potential intervention to rectify non-natives, thereby improving their perception of English speech streams.

How does it end? Endpoints of boundaries lead to completion in macro-events

While watching someone kicking a ball, missing moments of ball contact can be incorrectly identified as seen if the event is continued in a causal manner (i.e., the ball flying off). Does event completion also occur for events of a larger scale such as having breakfast (macro-event), which consists of multiple sub-steps like toasting bread (micro-event)? We conducted two experiments to measure event completion in macro-events presenting portions of multiple micro-events. In Experiment 1, video summaries were formed with or without event boundary information where a macro-end was either present or absent. Macro-end signified an overarching goal achievement that signaled the completion of previous tasks (such as leaving the kitchen with a full breakfast plate). More completion occurred for summaries with event boundary information and macro-ends. In Experiment 2, we tested two alternative hypotheses to explore the underlying process by showing the beginnings or ends of a micro-event. While the predictive processing hypothesis suggests that event completion is based more on predicting the future states of the event based on beginning information, the backward inferences hypothesis suggests that event completion relies more on deductions formed after the fact based on event endings. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that the ends of event boundaries lead to more event completion, possibly due to their role in forming causal connectivity. These results help to further understand event completion on a macro level.

Beyond the episodic-semantic continuum: the multidimensional model of mental representations

Tulving's concept of mental time travel (MTT), and the related distinction of episodic and semantic memory, have been highly influential contributions to memory research, resulting in a wealth of findings and a deeper understanding of the neurocognitive correlates of memory and future thinking. Many models have conceptualized episodic and semantic representations as existing on a continuum that can help to account for various hybrid forms. Nevertheless, in most theories, MTT remains distinctly associated with episodic representations. In this article, we review existing models of memory and future thinking, and critically evaluate whether episodic representations are distinct from other types of explicit representations, including whether MTT as a neurocognitive capacity is uniquely episodic. We conclude by proposing a new framework, the Multidimensional Model of Mental Representations (MMMR), which can parsimoniously account for the range of past, present and future representations the human mind is capable of creating. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Goal Shifts Structure Memories and Prioritize Event-defining Information in Memory

Every day, we encounter far more information than we could possibly remember. Thus, our memory systems must organize and prioritize the details from an experience that can adaptively guide the storage and retrieval of specific episodic events. Prior work has shown that shifts in internal goal states can function as event boundaries, chunking experiences into distinct and memorable episodes. In addition, at short delays, memory for contextual information at boundaries has been shown to be enhanced compared with items within each event. However, it remains unclear if these memory enhancements are limited to features that signal a meaningful transition between events. To determine how changes in dynamic goal states influence the organization and content of long-term memory, we designed a 2-day experiment in which participants viewed a series of black-and-white objects surrounded by a color border on a two-by-two grid. The location of the object on the grid determined which of two tasks participants performed on a given trial. To examine if distinct types of goal shifts modulate the effects of event segmentation, we changed the border color, the task, or both after every four items in a sequence. We found that goal shifts influenced temporal memory in a manner consistent with the formation of distinct events. However, for subjective memory representations in particular, these effects differed by the type of event boundary. Furthermore, to examine if goal shifts lead to the prioritization of goal-relevant features in longer lasting memories, we tested source memory for each object's color and grid location both immediately and after a 24-hr delay. On the immediate test, boundaries enhanced the memory for all concurrent source features compared with nonboundary items, but only if those boundaries involved a goal shift. In contrast, after a delay, the source memory was selectively enhanced for the feature relevant to the goal shift. These findings suggest that goals can adaptively structure memories by prioritizing contextual features that define a unique episode in memory.

Decomposing the multiple encoding benefit in visual long-term memory: Primary contributions by the number of encoding opportunities

Although access to the seemingly infinite capacity of our visual long-term memory (VLTM) can be restricted by visual working memory (VWM) capacity at encoding and retrieval, access can be improved with repeated encoding. This leads to the multiple encoding benefit (MEB), the finding that VLTM performance improves as the number of opportunities to encode the same information increases over time. However, as the number of encoding opportunities increases, so do other factors such as the number of identical encoded VWM representations and chances to engage in successful retrieval during each opportunity. Thus, across two experiments, we disentangled the contributions of each of these factors to the MEB by having participants encode a varying number of identical objects across multiple encoding opportunities. Along with behavioural data, we also examined two established EEG correlates that track the number of maintained VWM representations, namely the posterior alpha suppression and the negative slow wave. Here, we identified that the primary mechanism behind the MEB was the number of encoding opportunities. That is, recognition memory performance was higher following an increase in the number of encoding opportunities, and this could not be attributed solely to an increase in the number of encoded VWM representations or successful retrieval. Our results thus contribute to the understanding of the fundamental mechanisms behind the influence of VWM on VLTM encoding.

Recall as a Window into Hippocampally Defined Events

We experience the present as a continuous stream of information, but often experience the past in parcels of unique events or episodes. Decades of research have helped to articulate how we perform this event segmentation in the moment, as well as how events and their boundaries influence what we later remember. More recently, neuroscientific research has suggested that the hippocampus plays a role at critical moments during event formation alongside its established role in enabling subsequent recall. Here, we review and explore the relationship between event processing and recall with the perspective that it can be uniquely characterized by the contributions of the hippocampus and its interactions with the rest of the brain. Specifically, we highlight a growing number of empirical studies suggesting that the hippocampus is important for processing events that have just ended, bridging the gap between the prior and current event, and influencing the contents and trajectories of recalled information. We also catalogue and summarize the multifaceted sets of findings concerning how recall is influenced by event structure. Lastly, we discuss several exciting directions for future research and how our understanding of events might be enriched by characterizing them in terms of the operations of different regions of the brain.

Infants infer and predict coherent event interactions: Modeling cognitive development

Mental representations of the environment in infants are sparse and grow richer during their development. Anticipatory eye fixation studies show that infants aged around 7 months start to predict the goal of an observed action, e.g., an object targeted by a reaching hand. Interestingly, goal-predictive gaze shifts occur at an earlier age when the hand subsequently manipulates an object and later when an action is performed by an inanimate actor, e.g., a mechanical claw. We introduce CAPRI2 (Cognitive Action PRediction and Inference in Infants), a computational model that explains this development from a functional, algorithmic perspective. It is based on the theory that infants learn object files and events as they develop a physical reasoning system. In particular, CAPRI2 learns a generative event-predictive model, which it uses to both interpret sensory information and infer goal-directed behavior. When observing object interactions, CAPRI2 (i) interprets the unfolding interactions in terms of event-segmented dynamics, (ii) maximizes the coherence of its event interpretations, updating its internal estimates and (iii) chooses gaze behavior to minimize expected uncertainty. As a result, CAPRI2 mimics the developmental pathway of infants' goal-predictive gaze behavior. Our modeling work suggests that the involved event-predictive representations, longer-term generative model learning, and shorter-term retrospective and active inference principles constitute fundamental building blocks for the effective development of goal-predictive capacities.

Using network science to provide insights into the structure of event knowledge

The structure of event knowledge plays a critical role in prediction, reconstruction of memory for personal events, construction of possible future events, action, language usage, and social interactions. Despite numerous theoretical proposals such as scripts, schemas, and stories, the highly variable and rich nature of events and event knowledge have been formidable barriers to characterizing the structure of event knowledge in memory. We used network science to provide insights into the temporal structure of common events. Based on participants' production and ordering of the activities that make up events, we established empirical profiles for 80 common events to characterize the temporal structure of activities. We used the event networks to investigate multiple issues regarding the variability in the richness and complexity of people's knowledge of common events, including: the temporal structure of events; event prototypes that might emerge from learning across many experiential instances and be expressed by people; the degree to which scenes (communities) are present in various events; the degree to which people believe certain activities are central to an event; how centrality might be distributed across an event's activities; and similarities among events in terms of their content and their temporal structure. Thus, we provide novel insights into human event knowledge, and describe 18 predictions for future human studies.

Construction or updating? Event model processes during visual narrative comprehension

The plot of a narrative is represented in the form of event models in working memory. Because only parts of the plot are actually presented and information is continually changing, comprehenders have to infer a good portion of a narrative and keep their mental representation updated. Research has identified two related processes (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1997): During model construction (shifting, laying a foundation) at large coherence breaks an event model is completely built anew. During model updating (mapping) at smaller omissions, however, the current event model is preserved, and only changed parts are updated through inference processes. Thus far, reliably distinguishing those two processes in visual narratives like comics was difficult. We report a study (N = 80) that aimed to map the differences between constructing and updating event models in visual narratives by combining measures from narrative comprehension and event cognition research and manipulating event structure. Participants watched short visual narratives designed to (not) contain event boundaries at larger coherence breaks and elicit inferences through small omissions, while we collected viewing time measures as well as event segmentation and comprehensibility data. Viewing time, segmentation, and comprehensibility data were in line with the assumption of two distinct comprehension processes. We thus found converging evidence across multiple measures for distinct model construction and updating processes in visual narratives.

Hyper-Binding: Older Adults Form Too Many Associations, Not Too Few

Associative memory declines with age, and this decline is thought to stem from a decreased ability to form new associations or bind information together. However, a growing body of work suggests that (a) the binding process itself remains relatively intact with age when tested implicitly and (b) older adults form excessive associations (or "hyper-bind") because of a decreased ability to control attention. In this article, we review evidence for the hyper-binding hypothesis. This work shows that older adults form more nontarget associations than younger adults, which leads to increased interference at retrieval and forgetting, an effect that may extend to others with poor attentional control, such as children and people with attention-deficit disorder. We discuss why hyper-binding is apparent only under implicit test conditions and how it affects memory for everyday events. Although hyper-binding likely contributes to forgetting, it may also confer certain advantages when seemingly irrelevant associations later become relevant.

Modeling human activity comprehension at human scale: prediction, segmentation, and categorization

Humans form sequences of event models-representations of the current situation-to predict how activity will unfold. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed for how the cognitive system determines when to segment the stream of behavior and switch from one active event model to another. Here, we constructed a computational model that learns knowledge about event classes (event schemas), by combining recurrent neural networks for short-term dynamics with Bayesian inference over event classes for event-to-event transitions. This architecture represents event schemas and uses them to construct a series of event models. This architecture was trained on one pass through 18 h of naturalistic human activities. Another 3.5 h of activities were used to test each variant for agreement with human segmentation and categorization. The architecture was able to learn to predict human activity, and it developed segmentation and categorization approaching human-like performance. We then compared two variants of this architecture designed to better emulate human event segmentation: one transitioned when the active event model produced high uncertainty in its prediction and the other transitioned when the active event model produced a large prediction error. The two variants learned to segment and categorize events, and the prediction uncertainty variant provided a somewhat closer match to human segmentation and categorization-despite being given no feedback about segmentation or categorization. These results suggest that event model transitioning based on prediction uncertainty or prediction error can reproduce two important features of human event comprehension.

The influence of event similarity on the detailed recall of autobiographical memories

Memories for life events are thought to be organised based on their relationships with one another, affecting the order in which events are recalled such that similar events tend to be recalled together. However, less is known about how detailed recall for a given event is affected by its associations to other events. Here, we used a cued autobiographical memory recall task where participants verbally recalled events corresponding to personal photographs. Importantly, we characterised the temporal, spatial, and semantic associations between each event to assess how similarity between adjacently cued events affected detailed recall. We found that participants provided more non-episodic details for cued events when the preceding event was both semantically similar and either temporally or spatially dissimilar. However, similarity along time, space, or semantics between adjacent events did not affect the episodic details recalled. We interpret this by considering organisation at the level of a life narrative, rather than individual events. When recalling a stream of personal events, we may feel obligated to justify seeming discrepancies between adjacent events that are semantically similar, yet simultaneously temporally or spatially dissimilar - to do so, we provide additional supplementary detail to help maintain global coherence across the events in our lives.

Shared representations of human actions across vision and language

Humans can recognize and communicate about many actions performed by others. How are actions organized in the mind, and is this organization shared across vision and language? We collected similarity judgments of human actions depicted through naturalistic videos and sentences, and tested four models of action categorization, defining actions at different levels of abstraction ranging from specific (action verb) to broad (action target: whether an action is directed towards an object, another person, or the self). The similarity judgments reflected a shared organization of action representations across videos and sentences, determined mainly by the target of actions, even after accounting for other semantic features. Furthermore, language model embeddings predicted the behavioral similarity of action videos and sentences, and captured information about the target of actions alongside unique semantic information. Together, our results show that action concepts are similarly organized in the mind across vision and language, and that this organization reflects socially relevant goals.

The metacontrol of event segmentation-A neurophysiological and behavioral perspective

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.

Event representation at the scale of ordinary experience

Weeks are divided into weekdays and weekends; years into semesters and seasons; lives into stages like childhood, adulthood, and adolescence. How does the structure of experience shape memory? Though much work has examined event representation in human cognition, little work has explored event representation at the scale of ordinary experience. Here, we use shared experiences - in the form of popular television shows - to explore how memories are shaped by event structure at a large scale. We find that memories for events in these shows exhibit several hallmarks of event cognition. Namely, we find that memories are organized with respect to their event structure (boundaries), and that beginnings and endings are better remembered at multiple levels of the event hierarchy simultaneously. These patterns seem to be partially, but not fully, explained by the perceived story-relevance of events. Lastly, using a longitudinal design, we also show how event representations evolve over periods of several months. These results offer an understanding of event cognition at the scale of ordinary human lives.

Neural connectivity patterns explain why adolescents perceive the world as moving slow

That younger individuals perceive the world as moving slower than adults is a familiar phenomenon. Yet, it remains an open question why that is. Using event segmentation theory, electroencephalogram (EEG) beamforming and nonlinear causal relationship estimation using artificial neural network methods, we studied neural activity while adolescent and adult participants segmented a movie. We show when participants were instructed to segment a movie into meaningful units, adolescents partitioned incoming information into fewer encapsulated segments or episodes of longer duration than adults. Importantly, directed communication between medial frontal and lower-level perceptual areas and between occipito-temporal regions in specific neural oscillation spectrums explained behavioral differences between groups. Overall, the study reveals that a different organization of directed communication between brain regions and inefficient transmission of information between brain regions are key to understand why younger people perceive the world as moving slow.

Event segmentation in ADHD: neglect of social information and deviant theta activity point to a mechanism underlying ADHD

Background

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most frequently diagnosed psychiatric conditions in children and adolescents. Although the symptoms appear to be well described, no coherent conceptual mechanistic framework integrates their occurrence and variance and the associated problems that people with ADHD face.

Aims

The current study proposes that altered event segmentation processes provide a novel mechanistic framework for understanding deficits in ADHD.

Methods

Adolescents with ADHD and neurotypically developing (NT) peers watched a short movie and were then asked to indicate the boundaries between meaningful segments of the movie. Concomitantly recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data were analysed for differences in frequency band activity and effective connectivity between brain areas.

Results

Compared with their NT peers, the ADHD group showed less dependence of their segmentation behaviour on social information, indicating that they did not consider social information to the same extent as their unaffected peers. This divergence was accompanied by differences in EEG theta band activity and a different effective connectivity network architecture at the source level. Specifically, NT adolescents primarily showed error signalling in and between the left and right fusiform gyri related to social information processing, which was not the case in the ADHD group. For the ADHD group, the inferior frontal cortex associated with attentional sampling served as a hub instead, indicating problems in the deployment of attentional control.

Conclusions

This study shows that adolescents with ADHD perceive events differently from their NT peers, in association with a different brain network architecture that reflects less adaptation to the situation and problems in attentional sampling of environmental information. The results call for a novel conceptual view of ADHD, based on event segmentation theory.

Working memory capacity for continuous events: The root of temporal compression in episodic memory?

Remembering the unfolding of past episodes usually takes less time than their actual duration. In this study, we evaluated whether such temporal compression emerges when continuous events are too long to be fully held in working memory. To do so, we asked 90 young adults to watch and mentally replay video clips showing people performing a continuous action (e.g., turning a car jack) that lasted 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15 s. For each clip, participants had to carefully watch the event and then to mentally replay it as accurately and precisely as possible. Results showed that mental replay durations increased with event duration but in a non-linear manner: they were close to the actual event duration for short videos (3-9 s), but significantly smaller for longer videos (12 and 15 s). These results suggest that working memory is temporally limited in its capacity to represent continuous events, which could in part explain why the unfolding of events is temporally compressed in episodic memory.

Toward an integrative account of internal and external determinants of event segmentation

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.

A Lasting Impression: Exploring the Meaningfulness of a Singular Moment

How do we explore the meaning and meaningfulness of a singular event that lives on with us as a lasting impression? What are the initial beginnings and final endings of such living moments? How do we make sense of the significance of events that are so meaningful that they have become a lasting impression. This paper focuses on the phenomenology of such lasting impressions, by drawing on an exemplary anecdote about parental bereavement in newborn intensive care. The phenomenological intent is to determine the depth and magnitude of moments that as healthcare providers we may all too easily miss. As well, the methodological intent is to show how as researchers we can engage in a qualitative manner with empirically obtained experiential material.

Differential effects of bilateral hippocampal CA3 damage on the implicit learning and recognition of complex event sequences

Learning regularities in the environment is a fundament of human cognition, which is supported by a network of brain regions that include the hippocampus. In two experiments, we assessed the effects of selective bilateral damage to human hippocampal subregion CA3, which was associated with autobiographical episodic amnesia extending ~50 years prior to the damage, on the ability to recognize complex, deterministic event sequences presented either in a spatial or a non-spatial configuration. In contrast to findings from related paradigms, modalities, and homologue species, hippocampal damage did not preclude recognition memory for an event sequence studied and tested at four spatial locations, whereas recognition memory for an event sequence presented at a single location was at chance. In two additional experiments, recognition memory for novel single-items was intact, whereas the ability to recognize novel single-items in a different location from that presented at study was at chance. The results are at variance with a general role of the hippocampus in the learning and recognition of complex event sequences based on non-adjacent spatial and temporal dependencies. We discuss the impact of the results on established theoretical accounts of the hippocampal contributions to implicit sequence learning and episodic memory.

Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory

Emotional fluctuations are ubiquitous in everyday life, but precisely how they sculpt the temporal organization of memories remains unclear. Here, we designed a novel task-the Emotion Boundary Task-wherein participants viewed sequences of negative and neutral images surrounded by a color border. We manipulated perceptual context (border color), emotional valence, as well as the direction of emotional-valence shifts (i.e., shifts from neutral-to-negative and negative-to-neutral events) to create encoding events comprised of image sequences with a shared perceptual and/or emotional context. We measured memory for temporal order and subjectively remembered temporal distances for images processed within and across events. Negative images processed within events were remembered as closer in time compared to neutral ones. In contrast, temporal distance was remembered as longer for images spanning neutral-to-negative shifts-suggesting temporal dilation in memory with the onset of a negative event following a previously-neutral state. The extent of this negative-picture induced temporal dilation in memory correlated with dispositional negativity across individuals. Lastly, temporal order memory was enhanced for recently presented negative (compared to neutral) images. These findings suggest that emotional-state dynamics matters when considering emotion-temporal memory interactions: While persistent negative events may compress subjectively remembered time, dynamic shifts from neutral to negative events produce temporal dilation in memory, which may be relevant for adaptive emotional functioning.

Event Integration and Temporal Differentiation: How Hierarchical Knowledge Emerges in Hippocampal Subfields through Learning

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.

Modal and amodal cognition: an overarching principle in various domains of psychology

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this paper, we suggest that both formats play a major role in most cognitive domains. We believe that a comprehensive theory of cognition requires a solid understanding of these representational formats and their functional roles within and across different domains of cognition, the developmental trajectory of these representational formats, and their role in dysfunctional behavior. Here we sketch such an overarching perspective that brings together research from diverse subdisciplines of psychology on modal and amodal representational formats so as to unravel their functional principles and their interactions.

Eye movements and event segmentation: Eye movements reveal age-related differences in event model updating

People spontaneously segment continuous ongoing actions into sequences of events. Prior research found that gaze similarity and pupil dilation increase at event boundaries and that older adults segment more idiosyncratically than do young adults. We used eye tracking to explore age-related differences in gaze similarity (i.e., the extent to which individuals look at the same places at the same time as others) and pupil dilation at event boundaries. Older and young adults watched naturalistic videos of actors performing everyday activities while we tracked their eye movements. Afterward, they segmented the videos into subevents. Replicating prior work, we found that pupil size and gaze similarity increased at event boundaries. Thus, there were fewer individual differences in eye position at boundaries. We also found that young adults had higher gaze similarity than older adults throughout an entire video and at event boundaries. This study is the first to show that age-related differences in how people parse continuous everyday activities into events may be partially explained by individual differences in gaze patterns. Those who segment less normatively may do so because they fixate less normative regions. Results have implications for future interventions designed to improve encoding in older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Measuring the perception and metacognition of time

The ability of humans to identify and reproduce short time intervals (in the region of a second) may be affected by many factors ranging from the gender and personality of the individual observer, through the attentional state, to the precise spatiotemporal structure of the stimulus. The relative roles of these very different factors are a challenge to describe and define; several methodological approaches have been used to achieve this to varying degrees of success. Here we describe and model the results of a paradigm affording not only a first-order measurement of the perceived duration of an interval but also a second-order metacognitive judgement of perceived time. This approach, we argue, expands the form of the data generally collected in duration-judgements and allows more detailed comparison of psychophysical behavior to the underlying theory. We also describe a hierarchical Bayesian measurement model that performs a quantitative analysis of the trial-by-trial data calculating the variability of the temporal estimates and the metacognitive judgments allowing direct comparison between an actual and an ideal observer. We fit the model to data collected for judgements of 750 ms (bisecting 1500 ms) and 1500 ms (bisecting 3000 ms) intervals across three stimulus modalities (visual, audio, and audiovisual). This enhanced form of data on a given interval judgement and the ability to track its progression on a trial-by-trial basis offers a way of looking at the different roles that subject-based, task-based and stimulus-based factors have on the perception of time.

The role of visual and auditory information in social event segmentation

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.

An examination of episodic future thinking in the emergency department among youth experiencing suicidal thoughts and behaviors

Youth experiencing suicidal thoughts and/or behaviors (STBs) frequently present to emergency departments for acute psychiatric care. These settings offer a transitory yet pivotal opportunity to assess, intervene on, and plan continued care for STBs. This study examined a clinically relevant, understudied aspect of psychological functioning among youth experiencing STBs in the emergency department: episodic future thinking, or the ability to imagine discrete autobiographical future events. A sample of 167 youths (10-17 years) presenting to a pediatric psychiatric emergency department for STBs completed a performance-based measure of episodic future thinking assessing richness in detail and subjective characteristics of imagined future events. STB recurrence was assessed 6 months later. Immediately following a suicide-related crisis, youth demonstrated mixed abilities to imagine their future: they generated some concrete future event details but did not subjectively perceive these events as being very detailed or likely to occur. Older adolescents (i.e., 15-17) generated more episodic details than pre-/younger adolescents (i.e., 10-14), particularly those pertaining to actions or sensory perceptions. There was no evidence linking less detailed episodic future thinking and greater likelihood of STBs following the emergency department visit; instead, hopelessness was a more robust risk factor. Findings underscore the importance and clinical utility of better understanding the psychological state of youth during or immediately following a suicide-related crisis. In particular, assessing youths' future thinking abilities in the emergency department may directly inform approaches to acute care delivery.

Prediction error and event segmentation in episodic memory

Organizing the continuous flow of experiences into meaningful events is a crucial prerequisite for episodic memory. Prediction error and event segmentation both play important roles in supporting the genesis of meaningful mnemonic representations of events. We review theoretical contributions discussing the relationship between prediction error and event segmentation, as well as literature on episodic memory related to prediction error and event segmentation. We discuss the extent of overlap of mechanisms underlying memory emergence through prediction error and event segmentation, with a specific focus on attention and working memory. Finally, we identify areas in research that are currently developing and suggest future directions. We provide an overview of mechanisms underlying memory formation through predictions, violations of predictions, and event segmentation.

The temporal dynamics of how the brain structures natural scenes

Individuals organize the evolving stream of events in their environment by partitioning it into discrete units. Event segmentation theory (EST) provides a cognitive explanation for the process of this partitioning. Critically, the underlying time-resolved neural mechanisms are not understood, and thus a central conceptual aspect of how humans implement this central ability is missing. To gain better insight into the fundamental temporal dynamics of event segmentation, EEG oscillatory activity was measured while participants watched a narrative video and partitioned the movie into meaningful segments. Using EEG beamforming methods, we show that theta, alpha, and beta band activity in frontal, parietal, and occipital areas, as well as their interactions, reflect critical elements of the event segmentation process established by EST. In sum, we see a mechanistic temporal chain of processes that provides the neurophysiological basis for how the brain partitions and structures continuously evolving scenes and points to an integrated system that organizes the various subprocesses of event segmentation. This study thus integrates neurophysiology and cognitive theory to better understand how the human brain operates in rather variable and unpredictable situations. Therefore, it represents an important step toward studying neurophysiological dynamics in ecologically valid and naturalistic settings and, in doing so, addresses a critical gap in knowledge regarding the temporal dynamics of how the brain structures natural scenes.