Christopher Baldassano

The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

Scientific Data · 2021 · 153 citations

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardiz…

Anticipation of temporally structured events in the brain

eLife · 2021 · 101 citations

Learning about temporal structure is adaptive because it enables the generation of expectations. We examined how the brain uses experience in structured environments to anticipate upcoming events. During fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), individuals watched a 90 s movie clip six times. Using a hidden Markov model applied to searchlights across the whole brain, we identified temporal shifts between activity patterns evoked by the first vs. repeated viewings of the movie clip. In many…

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 73 citations

How infants experience the world is fundamental to understanding their cognition and development. A key principle of adult experience is that, despite receiving continuous sensory input, we perceive this input as discrete events. Here we investigate such event segmentation in infants and how it differs from adults. Research on event cognition in infants often uses simplified tasks in which (adult) experimenters help solve the segmentation problem for infants by defining event boundaries or prese…

The brain hierarchically represents the past and future during multistep anticipation

Nature Communications · 2024-10-22 · 18 citations

Memory for temporal structure enables both planning of future events and retrospection of past events. We investigated how the brain flexibly represents extended temporal sequences into the past and future during anticipation. Participants learned sequences of environments in immersive virtual reality. Pairs of sequences had the same environments in a different order, enabling context-specific learning. During fMRI, participants anticipated upcoming environments multiple steps into the future in…

Top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries in narratives with overlapping event scripts

Current Biology · 2024-10-01 · 17 citations