Nat Neurosci. 2001 Jun;4(6):651-5 doi: 10.1038/88486.

Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries

Zacks JM, Braver TS, Sheridan MA, Donaldson DI, Snyder AZ, Ollinger JM, Buckner RL, Raichle ME.

Abstract

Temporal structure has a major role in human understanding of everyday events. Observers are able to segment ongoing activity into temporal parts and sub-parts that are reliable, meaningful and correlated with ecologically relevant features of the action. Here we present evidence that a network of brain regions is tuned to perceptually salient event boundaries, both during intentional event segmentation and during naive passive viewing of events. Activity within this network may provide a basis for parsing the temporally evolving environment into meaningful units.

PMID: 11369948