ArticleCognitive science2023
Bayesian Surprise Predicts Human Event Segmentation in Story Listening.
Article in Cognitive science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Predictive Processing Among Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder During Online Language Comprehension: A Preliminary Systematic Review.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Pooled it
- A dynamic affective surprise signal influences episodic memory.Cognition · 2026Article
- Event Segmentation in Language and Cognition.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Hippocampo-neocortical interaction as compressive retrieval-augmented generation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The active construction of past episodes.Translational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Duration Is Not a Reliable Indicator for Anticipating Event Boundaries.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Dynamic data visualizations as events: effects of framing and change salience on segmenting dynamic maps.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Temporal propagation of neural state boundaries in naturalistic context.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Spurious autobiographical memories of psychosis: a dopamine-gated neuroplasticity account for relapse and treatment-resistant psychosis.Psychological medicine · 2025Review
- Brain network dynamics predict moments of surprise across contexts.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Fast-timescale hippocampal processes bridge between slowly unfurling neocortical states during memory search.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Large language models can segment narrative events similarly to humans.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- The "Naturalistic Free Recall" dataset: four stories, hundreds of participants, and high-fidelity transcriptions.Scientific data · 2024Article
- The default network dominates neural responses to evolving movie stories.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT-2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT-2 to compute the time series of prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT-2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error.
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