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How children differ in structuring continuous experience: Insights from individualized neural state boundaries

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Levi Antle¹ (), Robyn Wilford², Katherine Duncan³, Amy Finn⁴; ¹University of Toronto

To deal with the onslaught of continuous information that we experience moment to moment, humans carve up our experience into smaller, discrete, chunks (e.g. events)—via a process called event segmentation. Discretizing our experience in this way matters greatly for our cognition, shaping what we remember, determining what information is accessible, and even affecting the predictions we generate. However, little research has explored event segmentation in children, and much existing work contradicts Event Segmentation Theory (EST). Functional MRI (fMRI) evidence suggests children divide information into fewer events than adults, yet EST predicts children should divide information into more. We propose this discrepancy between theory and data arises from the current methodology’s reliance on modelling group-averaged data. Children’s fMRI data is more variable than adults due to greater motion profiles and individual differences, and more variability systematically biases models towards less events, possibility, resulting in the observed discrepancy. By adapting an individualized, neural, event segmentation measure for children that accounts for their increased variability, this study will resolve the discrepancy between theory and data while enabling the investigation of individual differences in children’s segmentation. After adapting this measure, we will examine how segmentation changes across development and how the magnitude of individual differences shifts with age. We will first examine how the number of events changes with age and then assess how the magnitude of individual differences in the number and timing of events evolves across development.

Topic Area: OTHER