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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Top-Down Propagation of Neural State Boundaries During Movie Viewing

Djamari Oetringer¹, Sarah Henderson, Dora Gözükara¹, Linda Geerligs¹; ¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour

Presenter: Linda Geerligs

Our senses receive a continuous stream of complex information, which we segment into discrete events. Previous research has related such events to neural states: temporally and regionally specific stable patterns of brain activity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there was evidence for top-down or bottom-up propagation of neural state boundaries. To do so, we used intracranial measurements with high temporal resolution while subjects were watching a movie. As this is the first study of neural states in intracranial data in the context of event segmentation, we also investigated whether known properties of neural states could be replicated. The neural state boundaries indeed aligned with stimulus features and between brain areas. Importantly, we found support for top-down propagation of neural state boundaries at the onsets and offsets of clauses. Interestingly, we did not observe a consistent top-down or bottom-up propagation in general across all timepoints, suggesting that neural state boundaries could propagate in both a top-down and bottom-up manner, with the direction depending on the stimulus input at that moment. Taken together, our findings provide new insights on how neural state boundaries are shared across brain regions and strengthen the foundation of studying neural states in electrophysiology.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

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