Washington University in St. Louis, WA, USA.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 May;23(5):1052-64. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21524. Epub 2010 Jun 3.
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.
观察者会自发地将较大的活动分割成较小的事件。例如，“洗车”可能会被分割成“擦洗”、“冲洗”和“擦干”汽车。这个过程称为事件分割，它将“现在正在发生什么”与“刚才发生了什么”区分开来。在这项研究中，我们表明，当人们获取最近的信息时，事件分割可以预测海马体的活动。参与者观看叙事电影，偶尔会尝试从电影中最近出现的物体中回忆。物体呈现和测试之间的延迟总是为 5 秒。关键的是，对于一些物体，事件在延迟期间发生了变化，而对于另一些物体，事件则持续发生。使用 fMRI，我们检查了当延迟期间事件发生变化时，与检索相关的大脑活动是否存在差异。包括海马体在内的涉及长时间记忆过去经历的大脑区域，在延迟期间事件发生变化时，在检索过程中更加活跃。因此，从记忆中检索出刚刚过去 5 秒的物体的方式似乎部分取决于这 5 秒内发生的事情。这些数据强烈表明，将正在进行的活动分割成事件是一种控制过程，它可以控制事件记忆何时被更新。
