@article{506,
  author = {Sebastian Michelmann and Uri Hasson and Kenneth Norman},
  title = {Evidence That Event Boundaries Are Access Points for Memory Retrieval},
  abstract = {<p>When recalling memories, we often scan information-rich continuous episodes, for example, to find our keys. How does our brain access and search through those memories? We suggest that high-level structure, marked by event boundaries, guides us through this process: In our computational model, memory scanning is sped up by skipping ahead to the next event boundary upon reaching a decision threshold. In adult Mechanical Turk workers from the United States, we used a movie (normed for event boundaries; Study 1,\&nbsp;<em>N</em>\&nbsp;= 203) to prompt memory scanning of movie segments for answers (Study 2,\&nbsp;<em>N</em>\&nbsp;= 298) and mental simulation (Study 3,\&nbsp;<em>N</em>\&nbsp;= 100) of these segments. Confirming model predictions, we found that memory-scanning times varied as a function of the number of event boundaries within a segment and the distance of the search target to the previous boundary (the key diagnostic parameter). Mental simulation times were also described by a skipping process with a higher skipping threshold than memory scanning. These findings identify event boundaries as access points to memory.</p>
},
  year = {2023},
  journal = {Psychological Science},
  doi = {10.1177/09567976221128206},
}