Our brain breaks life into 'events' to make sense of the chaos

Life, as we know it, is a collection of small events; brewing morning coffee, letting the dog out, starting the laptop, letting the dog back in.

Our brains are constantly on the job, observing and processing these pieces that together make up our day.

Start and finish of events

Professor Jeff Zacks, head of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Washington University, shines light on an essential fact.

“Knowing where events begin and where they end is crucial to understanding the world.”

Professor Zacks’ research has focused on understanding this fundamental aspect of human cognition.

Computer models learning from uncertainty

To comprehend these processes better, Professor Zacks and his research team embarked on two separate studies.

In the first project, they trained computer models to watch over 25 hours of videos featuring people performing simple, daily tasks. After this, they asked the computer models to predict what would happen next.

Interestingly, the results showed that these models performed best when they responded to uncertainty.

In situations where predictions of next actions puzzled them, the models would assess the scene from scratch – a strategy that improved their understanding remarkably.

Unexpected turn of events in the brain

Professor Zacks had previously hypothesized that the human brain was particularly sensitive to life’s little surprises and would reassess a situation every time something unexpected happened.

He proposed that surprising situations forced people to re-evaluate their surroundings, a concept known as “prediction error.”

However, the study’s findings threw a wrench in this theory, with the model paying more attention to uncertainty than to prediction errors. The researchers were undeterred by these findings.

“We’re doing science here. We revise theories when faced with new data,” said Professor Zacks.

Balancing act of events in the brain

Surprises continue to matter, however, and the concept of prediction error should not be entirely discarded.

Tan Nguyen, a graduate student in Zacks’ Dynamic Cognition Laboratory proposes an alternative approach – the brain possibly uses both mechanisms in balance.

“It’s not a case of either/or. Each model can make unique contributions to our understanding of human cognition,” explained Nguyen.

Exploring memory and event comprehension

Taking the research further, another member of the Dynamic Cognition Lab, Maverick Smith, is inspecting the correlation between event comprehension and memory.

Smith collaborated with Heather Bailey, an associate professor at Kansas State University and a former postdoc at WashU.

Their work collates evidence suggesting that long-term memory is closely tied to one’s ability to discern logically and accurately where one event ends and another begins.

“There are a lot of individual differences in the ability to identify when events start and stop, and those differences can strongly predict how much people remember later on,” noted Smith.

Brain’s capacity to process events

Smith’s research shows that older people often have difficulty processing events, a problem that potentially contributes to age-related memory loss.

“Maybe there’s a way we can intervene to help them better remember the events in their lives,” said Smith.

Professor Zacks, Nguyen, Smith, and other members of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences have ambitious plans to deepen their understanding of the brain’s capacity to process and remember events.

Currently, they’re using fMRI brain imaging to monitor real-time responses to everyday event videos from 45 study participants.

In one ongoing study, the team is tracking eye movements, revealing how we visually process the world around us.

Another of Smith’s video-based experiments aims to improve the memory of study subjects – including older people and Alzheimer’s patients – by making event boundaries more identifiable.

The brain’s understanding of events

“Some people are definitely better than others at segmenting events into meaningful chunks. Can that ability be improved, and can that lead to improvements in memory? Those are the questions we’re still asking,” Smith concluded.

In the end, our understanding of the world hinges on how we comprehend the mundane, everyday occurrences that make up our lives.

In a world driven by big events, we often overlook these smaller instances. Yet, it’s these “little things” that allow our brains to comprehend and navigate our lives.

The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

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