Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Event segmentation is a fundamental process that improves understanding of current events and recall of past events. Naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) can be used to study the neural underpinnings of event segmentation, with recent work suggesting that perceived event boundaries relate to changes in neural states that coincide in several regions across the cortex. This project answers the question whether these neural state changes are stable across the adult lifespan. We show that neural states become significantly longer with increasing age, particularly in the visual cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our results suggest decreased differentiation between successive neural states with increasing age, or a blurring of events over time. But critically, the relationship between neural states and perceived event boundaries remains similar with age, suggesting preserved coarse event segmentation.