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Contributed Talk Session: Tuesday, August 4, 10:15 – 11:15 am, Skirball Theater
Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Shared and Distinct Neural Responses at Event Boundaries and Task Transitions

Zhuoyang Li¹, Christopher Honey¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

Presenter: Zhuoyang Li

Our mental lives are punctuated by transitions: we complete one chore and turn to the next, or we finish reading one chapter and begin the next. In what ways do our brains re-organize at such transitions? The two most studied forms of mental transitions — event segmentation and task-set switching — have been investigated independently. Here, we ask whether there are common neural processes operating at boundaries between narrative episodes and boundaries between goal-directed subtasks. We collected fMRI data from seven participants across three tasks: movie watching, word generation, and explanation generation. We observed boundary-locked BOLD increases in all three tasks both in the default mode network and in prefrontal regions. However, while the boundary-associated voxel patterns in default mode network regions generalized across all task pairs, the prefrontal boundary patterns were more task-selective. We conclude that the activity in the DMN likely reflects a context-updating process which is common to movie boundaries and subtask boundaries. Conversely, the more selective patterns in the PFC may track differences in control demands between movie viewing and active generation tasks.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition