Poster Presentation

Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Cinematic Cuts Reshape Neural Event Boundaries: Individual-Level Evidence From Naturalistic Movie Viewing

Alex Ye¹, Claire Sun¹, Sonia Chun¹, Coraline Rinn Iordan¹; ¹University of Rochester

Presenter: Alex Ye

To remember our continuous naturalistic experiences, we segment them into individual events with high internal perceptual and/or semantic stability, which become critical units for episodic memory encoding and retrieval. In the audiovisual domain, most prior work has studied the neural mechanisms of event segmentation using naturalistic media, e.g., films and TV shows. However, it remains unclear whether and how cinematic cuts between scenes may artificially influence event perception and memory in the brain during movie viewing compared to naturalistic experience, given their ubiquity in the former and their complete absence in the latter. Participants (N=7) each viewed a unique version of a 44-minute single-take TV episode in which 18 target narrative events were presented in one of three conditions: Original (unedited), Canonical (cut inserted at a high-probability event boundary), or Adversarial (cut inserted at a low-probability boundary). We used a data-driven procedure to identify individual neural event boundaries in Default Mode Network (DMN) regions of each participant. Preliminary results show that canonical cuts increased the probability of generating an event boundary in the angular gyrus (AG, β=0.066, t(6)=2.36). Additionally, all cinematic cuts reduced inter-subject neural synchrony (ISC) in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC, d <-0.67), whereas only Adversarial cuts had a similar effect in AG (d=-0.76). Our results suggest that visual cinematic cuts interact with the cortical hierarchy of narrative and event processing regions in the human brain.

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