Abstract
Spatial boundaries have been shown to signal the likely ending of one situation and beginning of another, segmenting ongoing experience into events. The present study investigated how event memory is affected when event segmentation processes are disrupted, by imposing cognitive interference at spatial boundaries during encoding. Ninety-two participants used a virtual reality headset to explore a five-room building containing interactable objects. During the exploration, participants encountered virtual distractor tasks at either doorways or the middle of rooms, with distractor tasks temporarily demanding either visuo-spatial working memory or simple reaction responses. Later recall for the temporal order and contextual location of objects was examined and compared with controls, who explored the building without any distractions. While Dunnett’s Tests and ANCOVAs largely failed to detect significant effects, emerging data trends are discussed from the perspective of Event Segmentation Theory. Contrary to hypotheses, it was only when the visuo-spatial task occurred in the middle of rooms that distractor tasks impaired event memory. It is argued that the preoccupation of working memory with the visuo-spatial task prevents the continuation of the mental representation for the encapsulating room. A natural preference to dwell at event boundaries during exploration was observed, particularly when those boundaries were cued by information relevant to the participant’s main goal (spatial boundaries) as compared to their subordinate goals (distractor tasks). The more time that was spent near spatial boundaries relative to in-between them was directly related to better event memory. Together findings exemplify the reliance on spatial boundaries and working memory during event cognition.