Abstract
A fundamental aspect of human experience is that it is segmented into discrete events. This may be underpinned by transitions between distinct neural states. Using an innovative data-driven state segmentation method, we investigate how neural states are organized across the cortical hierarchy and where in the cortex neural state boundaries and perceived event boundaries overlap. Our results show that neural state boundaries are organized in a temporal cortical hierarchy, with short states in primary sensory regions, and long states in lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. State boundaries are shared within and between groups of brain regions that resemble well-known functional networks. Perceived event boundaries overlap with neural state boundaries across large parts of the cortical hierarchy, particularly when those state boundaries demarcate a strong transition or are shared between brain regions. Taken together, these findings suggest that a partially nested cortical hierarchy of neural states forms the basis of event segmentation.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
First, we have described our analyses more clearly, regarding how the overlap between neural state and event boundaries is computed and how we compare this overlap for shared vs. non-shared states. This also helped us streamline our analyses more and we now use the same metric (absolute overlap) throughout the manuscript, also for investigating the effect of boundary strength. This should make the paper easier to follow for readers. Second, we have added additional analyses to more clearly demonstrate the effects of boundary sharing across (large) parts of the cortical hierarchy in relation to perceiving event boundaries. These analyses provide stronger support for the claims we made in the previous version of the manuscript. Finally, we have added some analyses to make sure that the effects we see cannot be explained by shared confounds or noise.
