This mid-term report overs the first 30 months of a 5 year programme of work which aims to address all of the goals of the EVENTS project. The main methods of the project involve cognitive testing (in healthy adults and adults with brain disease), functional MRI scanning and computational modelling. This mixed methods approach capitalizes on the strength of each, with the aim that conclusions made on the basis of one can be tested on another. In this way, we will provide a comprehensive and generalizable account of the psychological and neural processes that underpin event cognition. In line with the planned evolution of the work over the course of the project, we have already conducted extensive cognitive testing in healthy participants and several fMRI studies. One study involving adults with brain disease is well underway and another has ethical approval pending. Computational modelling, inspired by the new behavioral findings, will be undertaken in the next phase of the project.
The PI published a review of event memory which summarized the state of the art and provided a theoretical framework for understanding event processing. They also organised and presented at a symposium at an international conference on memory about how knowledge affects how we perceive and remember events.
The first major aim of EVENTS was to define what the key dimensions of events are and to establish how they are represented in the brain. In an fMRI study we demonstrated that familiar and expected elements of an event dominate its representation in the brain. This reveals a fundamental property of how brains tend to use predictable information to “scaffold” our neural representation of an event and thereby enable the retrieval of more idiosyncratic elements. In another study we showed that events can be demarcated by changes in the goals of people present. A third study investigated the role of surprise in determining how well events are remembered and whether observing a surprising action triggers the neural markers commonly seen at event boundaries.
The second aim of EVENTS was to characterize how knowledge influences how events are perceived as they unfold. In a study that involved a large-scale online behavioral study and an fMRI study, we showed that knowledge constrains how people activate relevant conceptual knowledge in order to interpret a narrative story-line appropriately. We used Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder to calculate text-based measures of similarity in people’s recalled memories as well as cutting-edge fMRI analyses to both show that individuals who share the same prior knowledge of an event activate conceptual knowledge – as evidenced both neurally and behaviorally – in a more similar way to those who do not. In a separate line of inquiry, we are conducting two neuropsychological studies to establish how individuals with memory problems are able to comprehend and immediately recall short narrative events.
The EVENTS project has so far resulted in 5 research papers, one review paper and 10 presentations at national or international scientific meetings. Publications arising from the first 30 months of the project have already been cited over 30 times. While each publication is important, it is the collective body of evidence from bespoke paradigms that will really enable the EVENTS project to have a major impact on our understanding of event cognition. Outreach events have included presenting our research to MP’s at the UK Houses of Parliament, as well as public events at the University of Sussex. In the next half of the project we will build on the progress we have made so far, continuing to focus on the two aims above but also addressing our third and final aim, to develop a comprehensive neurocognitive model of event cognition.
