Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Sketchpad Series 

Does sensitivity to novelty relate to memory organization of narrative events?

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

Erin Welch¹ (eew2153@columbia.edu), Tianyu Gu¹, David Clewett², Lila Davachi^1,3; ¹Columbia University, ²UCLA, ³Nathan Kline Institute

Event boundaries are associated with increased arousal and focused attention and have a strong effect on memory organization. However, not all boundaries are created equally; considerable variability exists in boundary detection and event memory across individuals. Here, we asked if differences in memory organization relate to individual differences in novelty-related arousal, a key mechanism that supports event perception. We adopted an existing event segmentation task (Ezzyat & Davachi, 2011) in which participants read narratives containing both boundary and non-boundary temporal cues. The episodic organization of narratives in memory was measured using narrative sentence cued recall. Cued recall accuracy was measured using both traditional indices as well as semantic overlap between encoded and recalled sentences. Pupil dilation during a separate auditory oddball task was used to assess trait sensitivity to novelty and arousal. We hypothesized that greater pupil responses to contextual novelty (i.e., goal-relevant auditory oddballs) would be associated with greater segmentation of adjacent events in memory. In our preliminary sample of 18 young adults, multilevel modeling revealed that goal-relevant oddballs elicited significantly larger pupil dilations compared to standard tones, providing a physiological biomarker of novelty sensitivity. Preliminary analyses showed substantial variability in cued recall in both sentence conditions (e.g., boundary vs. control). Future analyses will test if and how such variance may be predicted by individual differences in oddball-evoked pupil responses, revealing a critical link between event perception in naturalistic stimuli and novelty sensitivity.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic