Macro-event processing in Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and healthy aging: Evidence from a Turkish...

Understanding everyday events requires integrating individual event units (micro-events) into coherent higher-level representations (macro-events). Cognitive decline may disrupt this ability, contributing to difficulties in comprehension, prediction, and goal inference. We investigated macro-event processing in Turkish-speaking healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) across two experiments. Participants recognized and labeled macro-events from sets of component micro-events. In Experiment 1, participants arranged micro-events into the correct temporal order. In half of the trials, the macro-event name was provided to test whether verbal cueing improved ordering performance; in the other half, participants named the macro-event after uncued ordering. A subsample completed a second administration to assess response stability. In Experiment 2, participants identified macro-events from incrementally presented micro-events, allowing assessment of how much information was required before recognition. Across experiments, we observed graded impairment with increasing cognitive decline. Naming accuracy reliably distinguished AD from the other groups, whereas differences between MCI and healthy controls were less consistent. Non-verbal measures, including temporal ordering, response stability, and the amount of information sampled before responding, revealed more robust group differences. These findings support macro-event processing as a core mechanism of event cognition that is progressively disrupted in MCI and AD, and indicate that non-verbal measures may provide sensitive markers of impairment beyond naming accuracy.