Every day experience feels seamless, yet the mind and brain must overcome bottlenecks in perception and attention to construct this continuity. How does the brain bridge these gaps? One possibility is that it relies on knowledge about unfolding experiences to fill them in. To test this, we used a temporal change blindness paradigm in which participants watched naturalistic movies containing occasional jumps during saccades. Forward jumps were less frequently detected than backward jumps, suggesting that predictive knowledge about how events unfold shapes perceptual continuity. Follow-up experiments confirmed that this effect was not tied to oculomotor responses per se, but reflected broader principles of predictive processing.
How are such experiences represented in the brain? One hypothesis is that continuous experiences are mentally compressed into a subset of key moments that anchor comprehension and memory. Using a storyboard paradigm, we found that participants consistently converged on the same key moments as most important for conveying the underlying story. fMRI analyses showed that these moments corresponded to peaks of neural synchrony across participants in the default mode network, and that their neural signatures were preferentially reinstated during recall. Complementary analyses using natural language processing revealed that these moments disproportionately carried the semantic content of the narratives.
Together, these findings suggest that experiences feel seamless because top-down knowledge fills in perceptual gaps, and that continuous experiences are structured and remembered through a subset of key moments that serve as anchors for comprehension and memory.
