Abstract
The real world presents our sensory systems with a continuous stream of undifferentiated information. Segmentation of this stream at event boundaries is necessary for object identification and feature extraction. Here we investigate the neural dynamics of event segmentation in entire musical symphonies under natural listening conditions. We isolated time-dependent sequences of brain responses in a ten-second window surrounding transitions between movements of symphonic works. A strikingly right-lateralized network of brain regions showed peak response during the movement transitions when, paradoxically, there was no physical stimulus. Model-dependent and model-free analysis techniques provided converging evidence for activity in two distinct functional networks at the movement transition: a ventral fronto-temporal network associated with detecting salient events, followed in time by a dorsal fronto-parietal network associated with maintaining attention and updating working memory. Our study provides direct experimental evidence for dissociable and causally-linked ventral and dorsal networks during event segmentation of ecologically-valid auditory stimuli.

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Dynamically changing landscape of brain activations at the movement transition is shown as a 20-s movie (in Quicktime® format)), with the movement transition heard in the background.

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.Funding sources

This research was supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship to D.S., by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to D.J.L., the National Science Foundation (BCS-0449927) to V.M. and D.J.L., the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund to J.B., and the National Institutes of Health (NIH-HD047520) to V.M.

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