Summary: New research shows that the head split the day into” pages” based on what a person focuses on. These mental limitations are not only prompted by changes in the environment but also by domestic objectives and interests. Participants ‘ brains organized events in experiments using sound stories in different ways depending on their level of concentration on particular information.
This study suggests that both perspective and what is most important to us at the moment influence how we encounter and consider events.
Important Facts:
- The mind forms new” pages” based on interest and personal goals, no just setting.
- According to MRI scans, people were able to segment stories differently based on their target.
- The study might provide some insight into how aspirations affect memory formation.
Origin: Columbia University
The moment a person ways off the street and into a restaurant—to take only one example—the brain emotionally starts a fresh” section” of the day, a change that causes a major change in mental activity. Transitions like this occur all day long, as people encounter fresh situations, like going out for lunch, attending their girl’s football game, or settling in for a night of watching TV.
But what determines how the mind divides the day into distinct events that we can both realize and understand differently?  ,
That’s what a new report in the journal , Present Biology , aimed to find out.  ,
The research group, led by Christopher Baldassano, an associate professor of Psychology, and Alexandra De Soares, finally a part of his facility, turned up interesting findings.
The researchers wanted to understand what causes the brain to create a barrier around the experiences we go through, effectively registering it as a new” book” in the day.
One possibility is that brand-new pages are entirely the result of significant changes in a person’s environment, such as how a person transitions from being outside to being inside a cafe.
However, it’s possible that our brains write internal scripts based on past experience, and that even significant environmental changes might be ignored if they are n’t in line with our current priorities and objectives.
To check their thesis, scientists developed a set of 16 sound stories, each about three to four minutes longer. Each narrative took place in one of four locations ( a restaurant, an airport, a grocery store, and a lecture hall ) and dealt with one of four social situations ( a breakup, a proposal, a business deal, and a meet cute ).
The scientists discovered that a person’s brain’s ability to divide up an knowledge into distinct events depends on their current level of interest and attention.
When listening to a story about a marriage proposal at a restaurant, for example, subjects ‘ prefrontal cortex would usually be organizing the story into events related to the proposal, leading up ( hopefully ) to the final “yes”.
The researchers did, however, discover that by requiring study participants to concentrate on the events that are connected to the couple’s supper orders, they may have forced the cerebral cortex to do so. Events like ordering food became crucial fresh pages for study members who were instructed to concentrate on these details.
We wanted to refute the idea that the brain is n’t actually “doing” anything engaging when it creates new chapters, it’s really responding quietly to a change in sensory input, according to Baldassano, who claimed that the sudden shifts in brain activity when we start a new chapter of our day are only being caused by sudden shifts in the world.
According to our research, this is n’t the case: The brain is actually actively dividing our life experiences into smaller pieces that are meaningful to us.
The researchers examined the brains of both the participants ‘ MRI scans to identify fresh brain activity and by asking them to press a button to indicate when a new chapter in the story had begun in a separate group of participants.
They discovered that the brain would divide stories into separate chapters based on the perspective being instructed to adopt. This did n’t just apply to the proposal-in-a-restaurant scenario: a person who heard a story about a breakup in an airport could register new chapters as they passed through security and arrived at their gate if they were asked to do so.
Meanwhile, someone who has heard about someone closing a business deal while grocery shopping might be prompted to either register the new chapters as new chapters or to concentrate on the initial stages of the transaction.
What their brains thought was a new chapter in the story influenced the details that the study participants were asked to pay attention to.
Moving forward, the researchers hope to investigate the impact that expectations have on long-term memory. The researchers also asked each participant to share everything they remembered about each story as part of the study.
They are still working on their understanding of how the perspective they were asked to adopt as they heard the story alters. In general, this study is a component of a larger work in the field to develop a comprehensive theory about how real-life experiences are organized into event memories.
The results show that how this cognitive system functions in particular requires prior knowledge and expectations.
Baldassano described the project as a passion project.
Use of complex analysis tools to learn about cognition is a significant challenge, he said, adding that” the kind of unconventional research in my lab is the most exciting and proud of itself for me because it challenges me to do so.”
About this news about neuroscience research
Author: Christopher Shea
Source: Columbia University
Contact: Christopher Shea – Columbia University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
The paper by Christopher Baldassano and others,” In narratives with overlapping event scripts, top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries..” Current Biology
Abstract
In narratives with overlapping event scripts, top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries.
Understanding and retaining the intricate experiences of daily life depend in part on prior detailed understanding of how events in our world change over time.
How does activating a particular script affect how events are timed, and how does the brain create event representations from a library of schematic scripts?
We developed a novel set of 16 audio narratives, each of which combines one of four location-relevant event scripts ( restaurant, airport, grocery store, and lecture hall ) with one of four socially relevant event scripts ( breakup, proposal, business deal, and meet cute ), and presented them to participants in an fMRI study and a separate online study.
The angular gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex ( mPFC) were influenced by scripts that incorporated both location and social information, demonstrating that these regions can track schematic sequences from multiple domains.
Participants were trained to listen for and remember particular script-relevant episodic details in some stories, making them ready to read either of the two scripts.
When participants were location primed, the timing of subjective event boundaries changed as the script-relevant changes in the narratives changed. This behavioral shift was reflected in the timing of neural responses, with mPFC event boundaries ( identified using a hidden Markov model ) aligning to location-relevant rather than socially relevant boundaries.
Our findings provide new insight into how narrative event representations are constructed by activating temporally structured prior knowledge and demonstrate that top-down goals are actively modulating neural event dynamics.
