Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain

Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when experiences are repeated? We hypothesized that, with repeated viewing of a narrative movie, brain regions would adapt their event representations 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, greater loss of event structure at a slow timescale predicted more detailed memory recall. These results highlight that event dynamics in the brain are not fixed, but can change flexibly with experience.