People with more life experience see and digest everyday ‘events’ more clearly, research finds

Research by Royal Holloway has found people with a varied social life mentally put their daily experiences into small “events,” compared to more isolated people who see their world as one-long stretch.

As our brains are continuously bombarded with information, it has to make sense of our experiences by dividing them into more meaningful and manageable chunks, called “event segmentation.”

This process is thought to be important for other psychological functions too, like memory, planning, and navigation.

Key to this process are event boundaries: moments when something meaningful or unexpected changes in the environment. For example, a person’s goal, a new place, or a sudden change in how we feel.

The new study, “Individual differences in experiential diversity shape event segmentation granularity,” published in iScience, investigated whether this can be partly explained by the diversity of our everyday experiences.

For instance, do people who live in more varied and changeable environments notice more events throughout the day, or do they merge them together?

To test this, 157 young adults watched the short Hitchcock thriller, “Bang! You’re Dead,” a suspenseful film full of social interactions and scene changes.

While watching, participants simply pressed a button when they felt one meaningful event ended and another began.

This gave researchers a measure of how finely people consumed the information.

The participants were also asked about their “experiential diversity”; the amount of environmental change they experience in their day-to-day life, both socially and spatially.

For social, this included questions about how varied their social lives were and how many people they had interacted with in the last month.

For spatial, the questions were about the complexity of participants’ home environment, how much they explored new places or ventured around the local neighborhood.

Lead author, Dr. Carl Hodgetts, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, said, “The study found that people who had more assorted experiences identified more event boundaries, and their brains were able to consume this and know when one event started and ended.

“This suggests that living a fuller and more varied life trains our brains to pick up more information around us, and helps to collate the information in a quicker, more digestible way.

“Compared to spatial experiences, social experiential diversity came out on top, suggesting that having a wide range of social interactions alters how we see events (even watching a movie).

“It’s not just about traveling to different places, or taking a different route to work each day, but connecting with a wide range of people, which helps us to understand what is happening in our world.”

The researchers will next use MRI scanning to see whether brain activity at event boundaries differs depending on how varied people’s lives are.