Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews, KY16 9JP, UK.
Cognition. 2021 Apr;209:104578. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104578. Epub 2021 Jan 7.
Event segmentation allows the flow of information experienced in life to be partitioned into distinct episodes, facilitating understanding of the world, action within it, and the ability to store information in memory. One basis on which experiences are segmented is the presence of physical boundaries, such as walking through doorways. Previous findings have shown that event segmentation has a significant influence on memory, with better memory for events occurring within a single boundary (compared to events that cross boundaries). By manipulating the features of boundaries and the amount of information presented between boundaries the present research investigates the nature of event boundaries. We make use of a virtual learning environment to present lists of words in virtual rooms, testing memory for the word lists as a function of the presence or absence of spatial-temporal gaps and physical boundaries during encoding (i.e., by maintaining participants within individual rooms or moving them through doorways between rooms). Across four experiments, we show that segmenting information with spatial-temporal gaps results in an increase in clustering (reflecting the structure imposed at encoding) an increase in the number of words remembered during later tests of episodic recall (a memory benefit) and an increase in recalling the words in the order of presentation. Importantly, however, the data show that the presence of doorways is not required for event segmentation to benefit memory: increases in clustering, memory for temporal order and recall performance were found with temporal gaps alone. Furthermore, the results suggest that episodic memory may be optimised if the amount of information between boundaries can be maintained within working memory. We discuss the implications of the findings for Event Segmentation Theory and propose an alternative theoretical account of the episodic memory benefits based on temporal clustering.
事件分割使得人们在生活中体验到的信息流可以划分为不同的片段，从而便于理解世界、在其中行动以及将信息存储在记忆中。人们分割经验的一个基础是存在物理边界，例如穿过门道。先前的研究结果表明，事件分割对记忆有重要影响，在单个边界内发生的事件（与跨越边界的事件相比）的记忆效果更好。本研究通过操纵边界的特征和边界之间呈现的信息量，来研究事件边界的性质。我们利用虚拟学习环境在虚拟房间中呈现单词列表，根据编码过程中是否存在时空间隙和物理边界来测试对单词列表的记忆（即，让参与者留在单个房间内或通过房间之间的门道移动）。在四项实验中，我们表明，使用时空间隙分割信息会导致聚类增加（反映了在编码时施加的结构），在随后的情节回忆测试中记住的单词数量增加（记忆收益），并按呈现顺序回忆单词的数量增加。然而，重要的是，数据表明，事件分割有益于记忆并不需要门道的存在：仅存在时空间隙就会增加聚类、对时间顺序的记忆和回忆表现。此外，研究结果表明，如果可以在工作记忆中保持边界之间的信息量，那么情节记忆可能会得到优化。我们讨论了这些发现对事件分割理论的影响，并提出了一种基于时间聚类的情节记忆收益的替代理论解释。
