Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants

Title

Aging and event segmentation: An fMRI investigation of individual differences in event perception and memory.

Department

Psychology Department

College

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Date Range

2013-2014

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

People spontaneously segment activities into discrete events, and such segmentation is associated with an increase in activity in a collection of brain regions including posterior cortex and lateral frontal cortex. Some individuals segment more normatively than others, and those people also remember more about the activity afterwards. The current study investigated whether individual differences in segmentation and event memory are related to individual differences in brain response to event boundaries, and age-differences in such relations. Consistent with previous research, older adults performed worse on behavioral measures of segmentation and memory than younger adults. Also consistent with previous research, regions in posterior cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex increased in activity around event boundaries. These brain responses did not differ with age, and the behavioral measures were unrelated to the evoked brain responses. Analyses assessing inter-subject agreement in brain response across time revealed an association with segmentation ability. These results suggest that much of the neural response correlated with event boundaries is robust to individual differences and age-related change.

Conference Name

Psychonomics

Conference Location

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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