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Neural Signatures of Event Boundary Effects in Episodic Memory Retrieval

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Doruntinë Zogaj¹ (), Regine Bader¹, Axel Mecklinger¹; ¹Saarland University, Germany

The present study explored how encountering event boundaries in narratives shapes memory retrieval processes, as indexed by ERPs. Participants listened to five-sentence stories in which a critical word in the third sentence either continued the ongoing event (no-boundary) or marked a transition to a new event (boundary), followed by two sentences confirming the action. Memory for these critical words was later assessed with an old/new recognition task while EEG-activity was recorded. As expected, critical words that indicated an event boundary were remembered better than no-boundary words. Electrophysiologically, both boundary and no-boundary words elicited old/new effects in the 300-500 ms and 500-700 ms time windows, typically associated with familiarity (mid-frontal) and recollection (parietal), respectively. Amplitudes for hits did not differ between boundary and no boundary words in the 300-500 ms window. Crucially, while between 500 and 700ms no reliable condition differences were observed at parietal sites, boundary hits elicited a larger right-frontal positive slow wave than no-boundary hits. This component resembles the right-frontal old/new effect, typically associated with strategic retrieval monitoring and evaluation. The enhanced positivity for boundary words suggests that their successful retrieval was more demanding, given that these words marked a prediction failure during encoding that necessitated event model updating. This may have increased the need for strategic retrieval monitoring to accurately decide whether the word had been heard before. Overall, these findings indicate that while familiarity-based recognition appears insensitive to event boundaries, later strategic retrieval processes are modulated by the cognitive demands of event model updating during encoding.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic