Schedule of Events | Symposia

Marking the Moments: ERP Evidence of Event Boundaries Enhancing Memory Formation in Narratives

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Doruntinë Zogaj¹ (doruntine.zogaj@uni-saarland.de), Regine Bader¹, Axel Mecklinger¹; ¹Saarland University, Germany

While event boundaries are known to enhance episodic memory, their influence on neural predictive processing and memory remains unclear. This study used ERPs to investigate the online processing of event boundaries during narrative comprehension, focusing on predictive processing and memory effects in naturalistic contexts. Participants listened to short stories (e.g., going to the supermarket). A critical word in the third sentence indicated either a predictable (no-boundary) or an unpredictable action (boundary), followed by two sentences confirming the action. EEG was recorded during listening, and memory was assessed with an old/new recognition task for the two words preceding the critical words, the critical words themselves, and new words. Memory was enhanced for the critical words in the boundary condition (BC) for high-confidence responses. As predicted, critical words in the BC elicited a larger N400 than in the no-boundary condition (NBC). In the BC, the ERPs to subsequently remembered critical words in the N400 time interval were more negative going than those to forgotten ones, an effect which was absent in the NBC. Notably, the ERPs elicited by the critical words showed a larger negativity for preceding words that were subsequently remembered compared to non-remembered ones. This retrograde subsequent memory effect was absent in the NBC. These findings suggest that detecting event boundaries in narratives triggers semantic processing, which supports memory formation for boundary events and pre-boundary information. Our study provides new insights into the role of event boundaries during the segmentation of continuous experiences and the shaping of episodic memory representations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic