Event understanding and memory in healthy aging and dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Zacks, Jeffrey M.; Speer, Nicole K.; Vettel, Jean M.; Jacoby, Larry L.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.21.3.466

Cited by 202 publications

(365 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Zacks et al [52] investigated the effect of aging and Alzheimer-type dementia on event segmentation and event memory. Healthy younger adults, healthy older adults and older adults with mild dementia segmented movies of everyday activities.…”

Section: Box 2 Event Segmentation and Neuropathologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmentation in the perception and memory of events

Kurby

Zacks

2008

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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581

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People make sense of continuous streams of observed behavior in part by segmenting them into events. Event segmentation seems to be an ongoing component of everyday perception. Events are segmented simultaneously at multiple timescales, and are grouped hierarchically. Activity in brain regions including the posterior temporal and parietal cortex and lateral frontal cortex increases transiently at event boundaries. The parsing of ongoing activity into events is related to the updating of working memory, to the contents of long-term memory, and to the learning of new procedures. Event segmentation might arise as a side effect of an adaptive mechanism that integrates information over the recent past to improve predictions about the near future. Making sense by segmentingImagine walking with a friend to a coffee shop. If asked to describe this activity in more detail you might list a few of the events that make it up. The events listed could be broken up by changes in the physical features of the activity, such as location: 'We started out by going down to the laboratory. We grabbed our coats and put them on. Then we walked out of the building to the corner by the subway station…' Or, they could be broken up by changes in conceptual features, such as your goals: 'We started our walk talking about how much construction is going on. When the topic turned to the new building with the coffee shop we decided to head over there to give it a try…' Such descriptions are typical of how people talk about events, and they illustrate something important about perception: people make sense of a complex dynamic world in part by segmenting it into a modest number of meaningful units. Recent research on event perception reveals that, as an ongoing part of normal perception, people segment activity into events and subevents. This segmentation is related to core functions of cognitive control and memory encoding, and is subserved by isolable neural mechanisms. Events and their boundariesBy 'event' we mean a segment of time at a given location that is conceived by an observer to have a beginning and an end [1]. In particular we focus on the events that make up everyday life on the timescale of a few seconds to tens of minutes -things like opening an envelope, pouring coffee into a cup, changing the diaper of a baby or calling a friend on the phone. Event Segmentation Theory (EST) [2] (see Glossary) proposes that perceptual systems spontaneously segment activity into events as a side effect of trying to anticipate upcoming information (see Box 1). When perceptual or conceptual features of the activity change, prediction becomes more difficult and errors in prediction increase transiently. At such points, people update memory representations of 'what is happening now'. The processing cascade of detecting a

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Section: Box 2 Event Segmentation and Neuropathologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmentation in the perception and memory of events

Kurby

Zacks

2008

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Self Cite

581

523

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“…This mirrors efforts in other domains which organise continuous streams of data into some unit of meaningful information. For example in the memory science domain, Zacks et al (2006) notes that "segmenting ongoing activity into distinct events is important for later memory of these events". Meanwhile in the video retrieval community Smeaton et al (2010) suggests that "automatic shot boundary detection is an enabling function for almost all automatic structuring of video".…”

Section: Identifying Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

LifeLogging: Personal Big Data

Gurrin

Smeaton

Doherty

2014

FNT in Information Retrieval

345

137

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“…If so, abnormal segmentation patterns should be associated with poorer memory for events. Indeed, memory for events is disrupted both in individuals who abnormally segment events (Zacks, Speer, Vettel, & Jacoby, 2006) and when experimental manipulations interfere with normal segmentation (Schwan & Garsoffky, 2004;Boltz, 1992). Elementary episodic memory units may be quickly forgotten or integrated into larger knowledge structures that represent knowledge goals and event structure (Conway, 2009).…”

Section: Implications For Episodic Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in Events Alter How People Remember Recent Information

Swallow

Deanna

Head

et al. 2011

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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Abstract■ Observers spontaneously segment larger activities into smaller events. For example, "washing a car" might be segmented into "scrubbing," "rinsing," and "drying" the car. This process, called event segmentation, separates "what is happening now" from "what just happened." In this study, we show that event segmentation predicts activity in the hippocampus when people access recent information. Participants watched narrative film and occasionally attempted to retrieve from memory objects that recently appeared in the film. The delay between object presentation and test was always 5 sec. Critically, for some of the objects, the event changed during the delay whereas for others the event continued. Using fMRI, we examined whether retrieval-related brain activity differed when the event changed during the delay. Brain regions involved in remembering past experiences over long periods, including the hippocampus, were more active during retrieval when the event changed during the delay. Thus, the way an object encountered just 5 sec ago is retrieved from memory appears to depend in part on what happened in those 5 sec. These data strongly suggest that the segmentation of ongoing activity into events is a control process that regulates when memory for events is updated. ■

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Event understanding and memory in healthy aging and dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Cited by 202 publications

References 66 publications

Segmentation in the perception and memory of events

Segmentation in the perception and memory of events

LifeLogging: Personal Big Data

Changes in Events Alter How People Remember Recent Information

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