The Development of Event Segmentation: An Introduction to the Special Focus

Event segmentation-the process by which people parse continuous experience into meaningful units-shapes how we understand and remember the world from early in life. Yet, despite its foundational role in cognition, the developmental trajectory of event segmentation remains poorly understood. This Special Focus brings together new research examining how children and adults segment events, with an emphasis on individual differences. The contributions shed light on how children's memory relates to their segmentation profiles, reveal neural signatures of individual variability in adult segmentation, and introduce methodological advances for tracking how individual brains carve up experience. Together, these papers suggest that variability-often dismissed as noise-may be central to understanding how event segmentation emerges and changes with age. We hope to inspire curiosity about event segmentation idiosyncrasies in childhood, prompting researchers to uncover why children experience the world so distinctively and what this reveals about cognitive development.