Brain study highlights paths to more effective learning and care
Baku, February 20, AZERTAC
A new study by Israeli researchers is shedding light on how the human brain manages a delicate balancing act: maintaining a sense of continuity in experience while also dividing life into distinct, meaningful events, according to TPS-IL.
The research, led by Dr. Shira Baror and Dr. Aya Ben-Yakov at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, addresses a long-standing question in cognitive science. Everyday experience unfolds as a continuous stream, yet people naturally remember it in segments, such as conversations, scenes, or episodes. The new findings suggest these two processes may be related but are not governed by a single mechanism.
“Our daily experience feels seamless, but memory doesn’t work that way,” Baror said. “We wanted to understand whether the brain uses one system to create both continuity and boundaries, or whether these are partly separate processes.”
The team focused on two well-known cognitive phenomena. One is serial dependence, in which current perceptions are subtly influenced by what a person has just seen or decided, helping stabilize perception in a constantly changing environment. The other is event segmentation, the brain’s tendency to mark boundaries when something important changes, allowing memories to be organized.
From a predictive perspective, both processes could reflect the brain’s attempt to anticipate what comes next. When predictions succeed, experience feels continuous; when they fail, the brain may mark a boundary. “This idea is very elegant,” Ben-Yakov said, “but we wanted to test whether it actually holds up in behavior.”
To do so, the researchers conducted three large-scale experiments involving 816 participants. Volunteers viewed sequences of images while the researchers systematically altered contextual elements, such as task demands or backgrounds, without changing the core sensory information.
The results showed that contextual changes alone were enough to disrupt serial dependence, weakening the pull of previous perceptions on current ones. At the same time, those same boundaries shaped memory in ways that mirror how people naturally divide experience into events.
Crucially, however, the effects on perception and memory did not line up neatly. Individuals who showed strong boundary effects in perception did not necessarily show similar effects in memory. “That dissociation was striking,” Baror said. “It suggests these processes are sensitive to context, but not driven by a single, unified system.”
Understanding that continuity and event segmentation are partly separate processes could help clinicians better interpret memory problems. People with conditions such as PTSD, depression, or schizophrenia often describe fragmented memories or a distorted sense of time, and the research suggests this may reflect difficulties in organizing experiences rather than a general failure of memory.
The findings may also influence education, where learning depends on how material is divided into lessons. Poorly timed transitions can disrupt the flow of perception without improving recall, while clear, well-placed boundaries may help information stick, shaping curriculum design and digital learning tools.
For older adults, memory challenges often involve organization rather than capacity. Distinguishing between continuity and segmentation could lead to better ways to identify early cognitive decline and develop strategies that help people structure experiences more effectively.
“Understanding how the brain balances stability with change goes to the heart of how we experience the world,” Ben-Yakov said.
The findings were published in the peer-reviewed Nature Human Behaviour.
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