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The influence of event boundaries on attentional dynamics and event encoding

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Karen Sasmita¹ (), Christopher L. Asplund¹; ¹National University of Singapore

Everyday experience involves continuous information flow, yet limited attentional capacity restricts the ability to process every sensory change. Research on event processing suggests that people naturally segment experience into discrete events at key moments, or event boundaries. In a preliminary study, we examined whether this segmentation process guides fluctuations in attention by prioritizing event boundaries. Participants performed a Continuous Performance Task (CPT) framed as browsing house catalogues. They viewed sequences of household objects within rooms across different houses, with each room type distinguished by wall color (e.g., green bedrooms, orange kitchens). Wall color changes at room transitions thereby marked event boundaries. Participants made speeded responses to indicate whether a household object was typical (93% of trials) or atypical (7%). Although wall color changes carried no information about object typicality, room transitions elicited significant response slowing that quickly recovered and remained stable over subsequent images. These results may reflect a boost in attention, particularly at event onsets. Ongoing work examines whether this attentional increase supports encoding of new events. After the CPT, participants will complete an object recognition task including new items that are perceptually similar to those seen earlier. If heightened attention at event beginnings facilitates event encoding, memory at these timepoints should be more detailed, with better discrimination between old and similar objects. Together, these findings may elucidate how attention dynamics across event boundaries shape event memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other