Can adolescents imitate the event segmentation behavior of adults by utilizing cognitive control?

Abstract

In our daily lives, the continuous stream of information is segmented into distinct events, a concept outlined in Event Segmentation Theory (EST). How individuals perform event segmentation and the granularity of the resulting segmented events are likely influenced by cognitive control. Compared with adults, adolescents prefer to segment event at a coarser granularity, lacking a hierarchical gradient. In this study, our aim is to explore whether adolescents can exhibit behaviour similar to adults when instructed to employ increased cognitive control during the segmentation of a movie. We provided different instructions to two groups of healthy adolescents when they were performing event segmentation task: one group was instructed to segment a movie as finely as possible (Fine Grained Adolescent), while the other group received no specific segmentation instructions (Free Segmentation Adolescent). Additionally, one group of healthy adults segmented a movie with no specific segmentation instructions (Free Segmentation Adult). We observed that, compared to Free Segmentation (FS) Adolescent, Fine Grained (FG) Adolescent exhibit greater similarity with Free Segmentation (FS) Adults. This similarity is prominently evident in two main aspects: Regarding the mean segment length, there is no distinction between FG Adolescents and FS Adults, but both groups exhibit a significant shorter length compared to FS Adolescents. As the number of situational changes in the movie increases, the estimated probability of segmentation is similar between FG Adolescents and FS Adults. However, FS Adolescents show a significantly lower probability compared to both of them. This suggests that while adolescents may not be fully developed, following instructions allows them to employ more cognitive control and behave similarly to adults during event segmentation process.