Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

How infants experience the world is fundamental to understanding their cognition and development. A key principle of adult experience is that, despite receiving continuous sensory input, we perceive this input as discrete events. Here we investigate such event segmentation in infants and how it differs from adults. Research on event cognition in infants often uses simplified tasks in which (adult) experimenters help solve the segmentation problem for infants by defining event boundaries or presenting discrete actions/vignettes. This presupposes which events are experienced by infants and leaves open questions about the principles governing infant segmentation. We take a different, data-driven approach by studying infant event segmentation of continuous input. We collected whole-brain fMRI data from awake infants (and adults, for comparison) watching a cartoon and used a hidden Markov model to identify event states in the brain. We quantified the existence, timescale, and organization of..., Please refer to the manuscript for details.
Citation: Yates, T. S., Skalaban, L. J., Ellis, C. T., Bracher, A. J., Baldassano, C., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2022). Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences., Please refer to the README for guidance on how to use this data.,