June 22, 2019 Journal article Open Access

Timescales and functional organization of neural event segmentation in the human brain

Geerligs, Linda; van Gerven, Marcel; Campbell, Karen L.; Güçlü, Umut

Humans segment ongoing experience into discrete events. At the neural level, this event segmentation occurs at different timescales in different regions, but little is known about how event boundaries are shared across regions. Thus, we investigate how event boundaries co-occur within and across networks throughout the cortex. Our results show that there is a temporal gradient of information processing over the cortex, with fast events in primary sensory regions and long events in precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex. This temporal hierarchy depends on sensory input as it generalized poorly to resting state data. Further, event boundaries are shared between regions within functional networks and across the temporal hierarchy between distinct networks. The default mode and fronto-parietal networks fractionate into subnetworks with fast and slow event timescales, possibly reflecting functional specialization in sub-networks. Together, these results provide the first complete overview of how event segmentation is organized in the human brain.