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Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries

Nature Neuroscience volume 4, pages 651–655 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Temporal structure has a major role in human understanding of everyday events. Observers are able to segment ongoing activity into temporal parts and sub-parts that are reliable, meaningful and correlated with ecologically relevant features of the action. Here we present evidence that a network of brain regions is tuned to perceptually salient event boundaries, both during intentional event segmentation and during naive passive viewing of events. Activity within this network may provide a basis for parsing the temporally evolving environment into meaningful units.

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Figure 1: Clusters of activity projected onto the Visible Man cortex10,26.
Figure 2: Time courses of focal brain activity in a subset of activated locations.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by grants from the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and the McDonnell Center for Higher Brain Function. The authors thank E. Akbudak, T.E. Conturo and D.C. Van Essen for their assistance, and B. Tversky for her comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Washington University, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    Jeffrey M. Zacks, Todd S. Braver, Margaret A. Sheridan, David I. Donaldson & Randy L. Buckner

  2. Department of Radiology, Washington University Medical School, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    Abraham Z. Snyder, John M. Ollinger, Randy L. Buckner & Marcus E. Raichle

  3. Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University Medical School, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    Randy L. Buckner

  4. Department of Neurology, Washington University Medical School, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, 63130, Missouri, USA

    Marcus E. Raichle

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  1. Jeffrey M. Zacks
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Zacks, J., Braver, T., Sheridan, M. et al. Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries. Nat Neurosci 4, 651–655 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/88486

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