Illusory-Causal Impression Attenuates the Detection of Event Boundaries

Abstract

The art of film editing bridges the transitions between discrete events to build a coherent, immersive experience for viewers. However, how the brain integrates seemingly separate moments into a coherent whole remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that causal impression—even when illusory—acts as a powerful heuristic to attenuate the neural representation of event boundaries, thereby facilitating a smoother transition across events. Using high-resolution electroencephalography, we presented 34 participants (24 women) with a sequence of images sourced from concatenated visual clips, where action–outcome continuity across the event boundary was manipulated to induce or break illusory causality. Behaviorally, we found that illusory-causal impression delayed the detection of event boundaries. Neurally, this boundary attenuation effect was marked by a reduced N2 amplitude, indicating mitigated cognitive conflict associated with a context shift. Multivariate analyses further showed that this causal impression reshaped the event representation by increasing neural similarity between generic cross-boundary states, thereby overcoming the typical boundary-induced impairment of cross-event association. Critically, this neural representational change was linked to behavior: the greater and more stable the neural separability in posterior brain regions across the boundary, the faster participants detected the event change. These findings suggest that illusory-causal impression mitigates event segmentation by maintaining more coherent neural patterns across the boundary, providing a neuroscientific basis for intuitive editing techniques used in filmmaking.