Humans are agents: our choices actively shape the trajectory of events in our lives. These choices rely on personal knowledge and preferences that can affect later memory. In this behavioral project, we studied how people’s memory of a naturalistic sequence of events is altered when their choices control the future using choose-your-own-adventure stories. We also examined how memory performance is affected in the face of denial of choices. 

Our thoughts are continuous on the scale of seconds and minutes, despite internal and external distractions. How are we able to preserve our own mental contexts in the face of such common interruptions? In this fMRI study, participants listened to narratives (intact or scrambled) that were interrupted (or not) by silent pauses or theory-of-mind tasks. 

Results suggest that aisde from hippocampal encoding, our brains could possess a top-level context representation acting like an "episodic background", which is continually and automatically updated in the background and is interference-resistant, likely via representation reversal. Collectively, results suggest two pathways to maintaining mental continuity, one through standard hippocampal encoding and reload, and another via "episodic background".

Studies of scene perception often focus on brief visual presentation (<1 second). But it may take several seconds, or even minutes, to make sense of a complex scene in real life. As each person takes their own “exploration path” through a visual scene, how does the history of their path influence their understanding of the next moment? In this fMRI study, we tested whether exploration paths during the perception of complex images could predict neural responses within and across individuals.