1. Abstract
We perceive the world as a series of events and fluidly segment them into episodes. Although individuals generally agree on the segmentation at the occurrence of a salient event, the number of determined segments is variable. Working memory plays a key role in tracking and segmenting a sequence of events; however, it is unclear which aspect of working memory is related to individual variability in event segmentation. We used computational modeling to extract the working memory capacity and forgetting rate of healthy adults (n=36) from an association learning task, and we studied a link between individuals’ working memory limitations and the subjective number of determined events in three movies with different storylines. We found that memory decay, measured in the learning task, is related to event segmentation: Participants who perceived either a very low (under-segmenters) or a very high (over-segmenters) number of events had a higher forgetting rate. We observed that under-segmenters performed better on a temporal recognition task for the movie with a linear storyline and an overarching story, benefiting from the schema. In contrast, the over-segmenters performed better at free recall than under-segmenters for all the movies. The results provide evidence that variability in forgetting rate is linked to the variability in event perception.