Acoustic features drive event segmentation in speech.

Abstract

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.

Do actions structure auditory memory? Action-based event segmentation effects on sensory responses, pupil dilation and sequential memory

“…This discrepancy in event position distribution may potentially explain our lack of differences between conditions. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with the results reported by Raccah et al (2022) for the middle positions of temporal order memory as a function of serial position during encoding. In their study, where boundaries were defined as a change in male/female speaker over a list of spoken words, they also found no significant difference between across and within conditions on middle sequence positions.…”

Top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries in narratives with overlapping event scripts

“…Event boundaries are often thought of as inherent features of a stimulus, and therefore predictable from the stimulus content alone 76,77 . For example, events are described as arising from "contextual stability in perceptual features" 78 , "the spatiotemporal characteristics of the environment" 79 , or "how fast various aspects of information from the environment tend to evolve" 39 . Although the dynamics of the external environment are certainly a primary input to the event segmentation process, our findings instead favor a view of event boundaries as actively constructed in the mind and dependent on the prior knowledge and current goals of an individual 13,80 .…”

Effects of context changes on memory reactivation

“…We experience the world continuously but perceive and store events that are segmented into meaningful parts (Zacks & Swallow, 2007). This segmentation in episodic memory reflects changes in contextual features such as background color, sound, location, or task rules (Clewett et al, 2017; Heusser et al, 2018; Horner et al, 2016; Raccah et al, 2022; Wang et al, 2022; Güler et al, 2023; Güler et al, 2024; Nolden et al, 2024). These findings suggest that contextual changes influence how an item is preserved in LTM.…”