Effects of cues to event segmentation on subsequent memory

Abstract

To remember everyday activity it is important to encode it effectively, and one important component of everyday activity is that it consists of events. People who segment activity into events more adaptively have better subsequent memory for that activity, and event boundaries are remembered better than event middles. The current study asked whether intervening to improve segmentation by cuing effective event boundaries would enhance subsequent memory for events. We selected a set of movies that had previously been segmented by a large sample of observers and edited them to provide visual and auditory cues to encourage segmentation. For each movie, cues were placed either at event boundaries or event middles, or the movie was left unedited. To further support the encoding of our everyday event movies, we also included post-viewing summaries of the movies. We hypothesized that cuing at event boundaries would improve memory, and that this might reduce age differences in memory. For both younger and older adults, we found that cuing event boundaries improved memory—particularly for the boundaries that were cued. Cuing event middles also improved memory, though to a lesser degree; this suggests that imposing a segmental structure on activity may facilitate memory encoding, even when segmentation is not optimal. These results provide evidence that structural cuing can improve memory for everyday events in younger and older adults.

Not so secret agents: Event-related potentials to semantic roles in visual event comprehension

“…Our analysis focused on the ERPs recorded from the preparatory state (critical panel 1) and the subsequent panel depicting a completed action (critical panel 2) at epochs of 300–400ms, 400–600ms, 600–900ms, as in prior research (Cohn et al, 2012; West & Holcomb, 2002). As in Figure 3, Sequence Types (agent, patient, non-preparatory-agent) were analyzed across 16 electrode sites divided into factors of Hemisphere (left, right), Laterality (lateral, medial), and Anterior-Posterior Distribution (prefrontal, frontal, parietal, and occipital) as in our prior work (Cohn & Kutas, 2015, 2017). Our within-subjects ANOVA looked for main effects and interactions of Sequence Type, Hemisphere, AP Distribution, and Laterality with a Greenhouse-Geisser correction for multiple comparisons.…”

Event boundaries in memory and cognition

“…Initial results supporting this hypothesis were correlational, showing the people and groups with better segmentation had better memory [16, 40, 42, 43]. More recent studies have shown that intervening to support event segmentation results in better memory, as long as one month later [39, 70]. Memory improvement also occurs if a set of information is learned by having it distributed across multiple events [25].…”

Constructing Experience: Event Models from Perception to Action

“…This benefit of segmentation for memory persisted through a 1-month delay [126]. Similarly, cueing of event boundaries improved memory for boundary information in both younger and older adults [127]. …”