A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall

Current theory and empirical studies suggest that humans segment continuous experiences into events based on the mismatch between predicted and actual sensory inputs; detection of these ‘event boundaries’ evokes transient neural responses. However, boundaries can also occur at transitions between internal mental states, without relevant external input changes. To what extent do such ‘internal boundaries’ share neural response properties with externally driven boundaries? We conducted an fMRI experiment where subjects watched a series of short movies and then verbally recalled the movies, unprompted, in the order of their choosing. During recall, transitions between movies thus constituted major boundaries between internal mental contexts, generated purely by subjects’ unguided thoughts. Following the offset of each recalled movie, we observed stereotyped spatial activation patterns in the default mode network, especially the posterior medial cortex, consistent across different movie contents and even across the different tasks of movie watching and recall. Surprisingly, the between-movie boundary patterns did not resemble patterns at boundaries between events within a movie. Thus, major transitions between mental contexts elicit neural phenomena shared across internal and external modes and distinct from within-context event boundary detection, potentially reflecting a cognitive state related to the flushing and reconfiguration of situation models.