Trait anxiety is associated with idiosyncratic neural event boundaries during naturalistic movie-watching

Alicia T.H. Liu, Jiajie Chen, Jadyn Park, Haena Kim, Yuan Chang Leong

Abstract: h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Anxiety is associated with altered patterns of attention to images and objects, but how it influences the perception of continuous experiences remains underexplored. Here, we examined how anxiety influences the segmentation of continuous experience into discrete events. Using a large-scale open-access dataset and data-driven methods to detect neural event boundaries, we compared neural event segmentation between healthy adults with high (N=60) and low trait-level anxiety (N=60) as they viewed a short suspenseful film. While the overall temporal event segmentation hierarchy was preserved across groups, higher-anxiety individuals had more idiosyncratic boundaries, exhibiting reduced alignment to both low-anxiety individuals and one another. This divergence was the most pronounced in the dorsal attention and frontoparietal control networks, suggesting that anxiety-related disruptions in top-down attentional control may contribute to less consistent segmentation. Furthermore, boundary variability in anxious participants was higher during moments rated as more anxiety-provoking by a large language model, controlling for arousal, valence, and low-level visual features. Together, these findings suggest that idiosyncratic event models in anxious individuals result in non-normative organization of continuous experience, leading to more individualized and inconsistent event boundaries. Such variability in segmentation may have downstream consequences for prediction, memory, and social cognition, offering a potential neural mechanism by which anxiety influences the interpretation and recall of everyday experiences. Our findings highlight trait-level variability as a lens through which the brain parses information and offers a neurocomputational framework for investigating individual differences in naturalistic event cognition.</p><h3>Significance Statement</h3> <p>We experience the world continuously, but our brains naturally organize this stream into smaller units––a process known as event segmentation. These “mental chapters” serve as building blocks for memory and shape how we understand our experiences. In this study, we used neuroimaging and computational tools to compare how anxious and non-anxious individuals neurally segment experience while watching a suspenseful movie. Anxious individuals had neural event boundaries that diverged more from others, especially in brain networks involved in attentional control. This neural idiosyncrasy may contribute to perceiving the world differently, which could disrupt shared understanding with others and reinforce cycles of worry and rumination. Our findings pave the way for future work on how trait anxiety shapes perception, memory and meaning-making.</p>

External IDs:doi:10.64898/2026.01.03.697513