Abstract:
Our daily lives are composed of many activities and experiences that form events. Segmenting
these continuous, ongoing experiences into smaller units is known as event segmentation.
Previously, ecological stimuli have been shown to increase subsequent memory at event
boundaries during active event segmentation tasks. Our study intends to determine whether
these effects were related to tasks (e.g., pressing the button to segment actively), or whether
they were related to a feature of stimulus that produces memory effects, as well as the brain's
ability to shape these events into memories. We conduct two experiments in this study:
behavioural and electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments, using ecologically valid stimuli to
observe event segmentation effects on memory. The first experiment consisted of 23
participants who watched a 30-minute POV video, followed by a memory recall task. This
experiment was consistent with our hypotheses and previous research in showing that stimuli
located on the boundary showed a higher degree of memory richness than stimuli located in
the middle. The effects of navigational turns at event boundaries on memory richness was
assessed, and significant differences were observed between turn and non-turn events. The
second experiment involved 20 participants who watched the same video divided into smaller
ten second segments while their EEG was recorded, followed by a memory recall test.
Behavioural components demonstrated nonsignificant results for memory richness during
boundary events and navigational turns at event boundaries. When theta power was compared
between event boundary and middle conditions using repeated measures ANOVA, no
significant interaction was found. A negative relationship was also observed between
subsequent memory and mean theta as shown by regression analyses. Experimental 2
contradicted previous experiments and literature as videos were divided into ten second with
no visual context, and the EEG results contradict literature due to a reduction in frontal
midline theta (FMT) at event boundaries in episodic memories. This research may have had
implications that affected our results, but it still provides us with the opportunity to continue
our research and explore more into the area of event segmentation and memory in the future.