Repeated Viewing of a Film Clip Changes Event Timescales in The Brain

Many everyday experiences share a recurring structure: routines, familiar routes, rewatched films, and replayed songs. How do repeated encounters with such structure alter the brain’s representations of events? We hypothesized that, with repeated viewing of a film clip, event representations in the brain may adapt by becoming either finer (more detailed) or coarser (more generalized). To test this hypothesis, we analyzed data from 30 human participants who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching three 90-second clips from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” six times each. We used hidden Markov models and pattern similarity analysis applied to searchlights across the brain to quantify the strength of event structure at different timescales for each clip presentation. We then tested how event structure strength changed at both slow and fast timescales with repeated viewings. Most brain regions exhibited stability in the strength of event structure at both slow and fast timescales. Other regions, however, showed flexible event representations that became more or less granular across repeated clip presentations. Notably, several brain regions exhibited consistent changes in the strength of event structure at a slow timescale across different movie clips. Furthermore, in lateral occipital cortex and middle temporal gyrus, slow timescale structure was correlated with subsequent memory for the clips. These results highlight that event dynamics in the brain are not fixed, but can change flexibly with experience.