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Neural State Segmentation in Naturalistic Goal-directed Activities

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Yining Ding¹ (d.yining@wustl.edu), Tan T. Nguyen¹, Jeffrey M. Zacks¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Human brain activity exhibits stable patterns that shift at boundaries between events. This process has been characterized through two main approaches: (1) time-locking multivoxel pattern changes to behaviorally identified event boundaries (Nguyen et al., 2025), and (2) data-driven neural pattern shift detection (Baldassano et al., 2018; Geerligs et al., 2022). However, results from these two approaches have rarely been compared. Moreover, most studies using data-driven approaches used Hollywood-style movies, leaving open whether prior findings in neural state segmentation persist without editing. Here, we analyzed fMRI data collected while participants viewed videos of everyday activities free of cuts or camera transitions, using the Greedy State Boundary Search algorithm (Geerligs et al., 2021). Replicating previous findings, we found longer neural states in higher-level associative regions and shorter states in lower-level sensory cortices. The range of neural states identified (20-70s) was generally longer than those reported previously, suggesting possible influences of continuity editing. In addition, regions with longer states overlapped with those identified by Nguyen and colleagues (2025) as exhibiting pattern shifts prior to behavioral event boundaries, providing converging evidence across analytical approaches. We observed alignment between neural state boundaries and behavioral event boundaries across the cortical hierarchy, with early visual, somatomotor, and medial prefrontal regions showing significant alignment for fine-level behavioral boundaries, and a near-subset of regions mostly in association cortex showing significant alignment for coarse-level boundaries. In sum, the nested hierarchical structure of brain patterns during movie viewing is present in unedited movies, and it corresponds to human subjective event boundaries.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Multisensory