Pupil-linked arousal signals track the temporal organization of events in memory
Open accessAbstract
Everyday life unfolds continuously, yet we tend to remember past experiences as discrete event sequences or episodes. Although this phenomenon has been well documented, the neuromechanisms that support the transformation of continuous experience into distinct and memorable episodes remain unknown. Here, we show that changes in context, or event boundaries, elicit a burst of autonomic arousal, as indexed by pupil dilation. Event boundaries also lead to the segmentation of adjacent episodes in later memory, evidenced by changes in memory for the temporal duration, order, and perceptual details of recent event sequences. These subjective and objective changes in temporal memory are also related to distinct temporal features of pupil dilations to boundaries as well as to the temporal stability of more prolonged pupil-linked arousal states. Collectively, our findings suggest that pupil measures reflect both stability and change in ongoing mental context representations, which in turn shape the temporal structure of memory.
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Emotionally salient events engage the arousal system and may facilitate encoding and drive enhanced consolidation of the corresponding memory traces.
“For example, emotionally salient events, which engage the arousal system, may facilitate the encoding and drive enhanced consolidation of the corresponding memory traces (e.g., refs. 30,31).”
From Place and behavioral modulation of hippocampal neurons during immobility (2026) · cites this paper as [31]
The Introduction says emotional stimuli induce arousal and that emotionally arousing stimuli can enhance local item-context memory. The Discussion links pupil-related arousal to how experiences are encoded as discrete memories. Neither passage establishes enhanced consolidation of the corresponding memory traces. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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“30,31).”
- Authors
- Clewett, D., Gasser, C., & Davachi, L.
- Affiliations
- New York University (US)
- Columbia University (US)
- Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (US)
- Corresponding author
- Davachi, Lila
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2020-08-11
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 4007-4007
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7421896
- OpenAlex
- W3048545550
- Cited by
- 154
- References
- 70
- Citations by year
- 2026: 25 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 9.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Institute of Mental Health (MH019524, MH114536, MH074692)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Cognitive Functions and Memory
- Keywords
- pupil dilation, autonomic arousal, event boundaries, temporal memory, memory segmentation, episodic memory, temporal order memory
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Arousal, Auditory Perception, Discrimination, Psychological, Female, Humans, Male, Pupil, Reaction Time, Time Perception, Young Adult, Memory, Episodic
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