Life is a series of small events: making morning coffee, letting the dog out, opening a laptop, letting the dog back in. Add them all up and you have a full day.
Our brains are committed to observing and processing the events that make up our daily lives, said Jeff Zacks, the Edgar James Swift Professor in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. “Knowing where events begin and where they end is crucial to understanding the world,” Zacks said.
In a pair of new papers, Zacks and other researchers in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering explore this key process of human cognition.
Zacks led a study that trained computer models to observe more than 25 hours of video of people performing simple, everyday tasks such as cleaning a kitchen or cooking a meal before making predictions about what happens next. The study came to a surprising conclusion: The computer models were most accurate when they responded to uncertainty. When the model was especially unsure about what would happen next, it would reset and reassess the scene, an approach that improved its overall comprehension.
Co-authors of the study, which will be published in an upcoming edition of PNAS Nexus, include Tan Nguyen, a graduate student in Zacks’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory; Matt Bezdek, a senior scientist in the lab; Aaron Bobick, the James M. McKelvey Professor and dean of the McKelvey School of Engineering; Todd Braver, the William R. Stuckenberg Professor in Human Values and Moral Development; and Samuel Gershman, a Harvard neuroscientist.
Zacks had previously theorized that the human brain was especially tuned to the small surprises that fill our lives. He proposed that people would reassess a scene every time they registered something they didn’t expect, a phenomenon known as “prediction error.” The finding that the successful computer model paid more attention to uncertainty than to prediction errors threw the prior theory into doubt. “We’re doing science here,” Zacks said. “We revise theories when faced with new data.
Surprises still matter, and there’s no need to completely throw out the concept of prediction error, Nguyen said. “We’re starting to think that the brain uses both mechanisms,” he said. “It’s not a case of either/or. Each model can make unique contributions to our understanding of human cognition.”
Maverick Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in the Dynamic Cognition Lab, is also taking a deeper look at the interplay between event comprehension and memory. Working with Heather Bailey, a former WashU postdoc who is now an associate professor at Kansas State University, Smith co-authored a review article in Nature Reviews Psychology gathering the growing evidence that long-term memory is intricately tied to the ability to logically and accurately discern where one event ends and another begins.
“There are a lot of individual differences in the ability to identify when events start and stop, and those differences can strongly predict how much people remember later on,” Smith said. “We hope to be able to create an intervention that could improve memory by helping people segment events.”
Like Zacks, Smith relies on video clips to better understand how the brain processes events. Instead of a person cooking and cleaning, his videos show a person shopping in a store, setting up a printer, or doing other mundane tasks. In various experiments, viewers push buttons whenever they discern the beginning or end of a particular event. Smith then tests the participant’s memory of the videos with a series of written questions.
Smith found that older people tend to have more difficulty processing events, a deficit that could play a role in age-related memory loss. “Maybe there’s a way we can intervene to help them better remember the events in their lives,” he said.
Zacks, Nguyen, Smith, and other members of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences have ambitious plans to further their understanding of the brain’s ability to process and remember events. Zacks’ team is working to use fMRI brain imaging to track how 45 study participants respond to videos of everyday events in real time. “We’re studying the actual neural dynamics of these cognitive processes,” Zacks said.
Another ongoing study tracks eye movements, providing new insight into how we see the world. “When people watch an everyday activity, they spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about people’s hands,” Zacks explained.
Smith is currently using video-based experiments to see if he can improve the memory of study subjects — including older people and those with Alzheimer’s disease — by making the boundaries between events easier to identify. Ultimately, he would like to understand how event observations are stored and maintained in long-term memory.
“Some people are definitely better than others at segmenting events into meaningful chunks,” Smith said. “Can that ability be improved, and can that lead to improvements in memory? Those are the questions we’re still asking.”
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