Key moments in naturalistic events synchronize neural activity patterns and dominate memory reinstatement

Abstract

Continuous experiences are experienced and remembered in terms of events that unfold over time. There is strong evidence that event boundaries segment experience during comprehension and that event representations are compressed in memory; however, this compression is poorly understood. We developed a novel storyboard paradigm to test the hypothesis that representations of continuous experiences are defined by a subset of key moments that capture the underlying narrative. Participants agreed on when key moments occurred; some key moments corresponded with event boundaries, but many did not. fMRI during encoding revealed that neural activity patterns throughout the default network synchronized across individuals at key moments. Further, comparing fMRI during encoding to fMRI during retrieval revealed that key moments are overrepresented in neural patterns that are reinstated during event recall in the posterior-medial cortex. These results suggest that continuous events are punctuated by a small subset of meaningful moments, which dominate neural representations during perception and memory.