Dataset Information

Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later.

ABSTRACT: When people observe everyday activity, they spontaneously parse it into discrete meaningful events. Individuals who segment activity in a more normative fashion show better subsequent memory for the events. If segmenting events effectively leads to better memory, does asking people to attend to segmentation improve subsequent memory? To answer this question, participants viewed movies of naturalistic activity with instructions to remember the activity for a later test, and in some conditions additionally pressed a button to segment the movies into meaningful events or performed a control condition that required button-pressing but not attending to segmentation. In 5 experiments, memory for the movies was assessed at intervals ranging from immediately following viewing to 1 month later. Performing the event segmentation task led to superior memory at delays ranging from 10 min to 1 month. Further, individual differences in segmentation ability predicted individual differences in memory performance for up to a month following encoding. This study provides the first evidence that manipulating event segmentation affects memory over long delays and that individual differences in event segmentation are related to differences in memory over long delays. These effects suggest that attending to how an activity breaks down into meaningful events contributes to memory formation. Instructing people to more effectively segment events may serve as a potential intervention to alleviate everyday memory complaints in aging and clinical populations. (PsycINFO Database Record

SUBMITTER: Flores S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5542882 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later.

Flores Shaney S Bailey Heather R HR Eisenberg Michelle L ML Zacks Jeffrey M JM

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition 20170406 8

When people observe everyday activity, they spontaneously parse it into discrete meaningful events. Individuals who segment activity in a more normative fashion show better subsequent memory for the events. If segmenting events effectively leads to better memory, does asking people to attend to segmentation improve subsequent memory? To answer this question, participants viewed movies of naturalistic activity with instructions to remember the activity for a later test, and in some conditions add ...[more]

PMID: 28383955

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Project description:Recent research has revealed that during continuous perception of movies or stories, humans display cortical activity patterns that reveal hierarchical segmentation of event structure. Thus, sensory areas like auditory cortex display high frequency segmentation related to the stimulus, while semantic areas like posterior middle cortex display a lower frequency segmentation related to transitions between events. These hierarchical levels of segmentation are associated with different time constants for processing. Likewise, when two groups of participants heard the same sentence in a narrative, preceded by different contexts, neural responses for the groups were initially different and then gradually aligned. The time constant for alignment followed the segmentation hierarchy: sensory cortices aligned most quickly, followed by mid-level regions, while some higher-order cortical regions took more than 10 seconds to align. These hierarchical segmentation phenomena can be considered in the context of processing related to comprehension. In a recently described model of discourse comprehension word meanings are modeled by a language model pre-trained on a billion word corpus. During discourse comprehension, word meanings are continuously integrated in a recurrent cortical network. The model demonstrates novel discourse and inference processing, in part because of two fundamental characteristics: real-world event semantics are represented in the word embeddings, and these are integrated in a reservoir network which has an inherent gradient of functional time constants due to the recurrent connections. Here we demonstrate how this model displays hierarchical narrative event segmentation properties beyond the embeddings alone, or their linear integration. The reservoir produces activation patterns that are segmented by a hidden Markov model (HMM) in a manner that is comparable to that of humans. Context construction displays a continuum of time constants across reservoir neuron subsets, while context forgetting has a fixed time constant across these subsets. Importantly, virtual areas formed by subgroups of reservoir neurons with faster time constants segmented with shorter events, while those with longer time constants preferred longer events. This neurocomputational recurrent neural network simulates narrative event processing as revealed by the fMRI event segmentation algorithm provides a novel explanation of the asymmetry in narrative forgetting and construction. The model extends the characterization of online integration processes in discourse to more extended narrative, and demonstrates how reservoir computing provides a useful model of cortical processing of narrative structure.

Dataset Information

Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later.

Publications

Event segmentation improves event memory up to one month later.

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