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The effects of event segmentation on temporal organization of free recall using staged events

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Xuan Zhang^1,2 (), Asaf Gilboa^1,2,3, Brian Levine^1,2; ¹Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Hospital, ²University of Toronto, ³Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, UHN

Understanding how people segment continuous experiences into meaningful events is fundamental to memory formation. Event boundaries—the moments when one experience ends and another begins—has been found to support episodic memory organization. However, most prior studies have relied on artificial or highly structured boundaries that do not reflect the complexity of real-life experience. The present study investigates how event segmentation affects episodic memory organization—particularly the temporal structure—using naturalistic, real-world staged events. In this paradigm, participants completed an audio-guided tour of two art exhibit sections followed by a delayed free recall task. To define event boundaries, external raters were recruited to identify meaningful event changes within the tour. To assess temporal organization across event boundaries, we conducted lag-conditional response probability (lag-CRP) analysis. Based on the rated event segments, Participants’ recall transitions were classified into either within- or between-event lags. Preliminary results showed greater temporal clustering for items recalled within the same event than across events, such that participants were more likely to recall the next item when it belonged to the same event segment. Forward asymmetry analysis further revealed a significant bias towards forward transitions within event segments compared to across events. Together, these findings indicate stronger temporal clustering for items within the same events than across event boundaries. Moreover, even in the absence of event boundary manipulation, participants identified meaningful event boundaries in naturalistic settings, albeit with greater individual variability compared to controlled laboratory tasks.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic