Neural state changes during movie watching relate to episodic memory in younger and older adults

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sarah Henderson¹ (sarah.henderson@austin.utexas.edu), Djamari Oetringer², Linda Geerligs², Karen Campbell³; ¹University of Texas at Austin, ²Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, ³Brock University

Event segmentation is a key feature underlying the ability to remember real-life occurrences. On the neural level, event boundaries have been shown to align with boundaries between neural states – stable patterns of brain activity that are maintained over time and shift at neural state boundaries. These neural states provide a valuable window into the neural underpinnings of event perception during naturalistic viewing (i.e., movie watching). The goal of the current study was to investigate how neural state boundaries relate to memory across the lifespan. We used the data-driven Greedy State Boundary Search (GSBS) method to implicitly identify neural state changes in younger and older adults’ continuous electroencephalography (EEG) data during movie-watching. Memory for the movie was tested and related to 1) neural state correspondence across individuals (i.e., intersubject synchrony of state changes) and 2) the degree to which the pattern of activity changes at these boundaries (i.e., the distinctiveness of neural states). Neural state boundaries identified within each participant individually significantly aligned across people, but did not differ with age nor relate to memory. The degree of change at neural state boundaries also did not differ with age, but was positively related to memory for the movie. These findings suggest that age differences in the perception of naturalistic events may be less pronounced than previously thought, at least when measured implicitly, and that greater distinction between successive neural states relates to better subsequent memory for one’s experiences regardless of age.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging