The mosaic of experience: How individual differences in attention and working memory shape event segmentation

Area of Science:

• Cognitive neuroscience
• Neuropsychology
• Memory research

Background:

• Episodic memories are perceived as continuous but are segmented into discrete events.
• Working memory (WM) and attentional control are crucial for this event segmentation process.
• The precise causal roles of WM and attentional control remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To synthesize behavioral, cognitive, and neural findings on event segmentation.
• To investigate the influence of healthy aging and specific cognitive profiles (ADHD, dyslexia, OCD) on event segmentation.
• To propose a mechanism-centered framework for understanding event segmentation.

Main Methods:

• Literature review synthesizing data from healthy aging and clinical populations (ADHD, dyslexia, OCD).
• Analysis of behavioral, cognitive, and neural evidence related to working memory and attentional control.
• Theoretical integration to develop a framework for event segmentation.

Main Results:

• Aging may preserve segmentation with strong semantic structure but falter under interference or high cognitive load.
• Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may lead to coarser segmentation due to attentional lapses.
• Dyslexia may impair fine-grained segmentation of verbal events due to temporal processing limitations.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) might involve idiosyncratic segmentation influenced by threat-relevant schemas.

Conclusions:

• Event segmentation emerges from the interplay of WM constraints, attentional control dynamics, and schema/contextual modulation.
• This mechanism-centered framework refines existing prediction-error models of memory.
• The proposed framework offers testable hypotheses for future research on memory segmentation.