Figure 1.

Experiment design. a, Behavioral study 1: Reports on the subjective moments of comprehension of the narratives. As participants watched a temporally scrambled movie (three movie stimuli; N = 20 per movie), they were instructed to press the “Aha” button whenever they experienced subjective comprehension of the plot (green), and the “Oops” button whenever they realized that their previous understanding was incorrect (purple). The duration of each audiovisual movie was 10 min, and the duration of each scene was 36 ± 4 s. b, Behavioral study 2: Event segmentation and causal relationship rating between events. In the first part of the study, an independent group of participants (N = 12 per movie) watched the movie in a temporally scrambled sequence, followed by the original sequence. In the second part, they were instructed to mark perceived event boundaries to the scrambled movie (red dashed lines) and to annotate each event with a short description. In the third part, they were instructed to rate the degree of a causal relationship between pairwise events they segmented themselves (bidirectional arrows). A score of 1 was given if pairwise events were thought to be causally related, a score of 2 when pairwise events held critical causal importance within the narrative plots, and a score of 0 was given otherwise. c, fMRI study. Another independent group of participants (N = 24, 23, and 20 per movie) participated in the fMRI experiment, where they watched the same movie in an Initial Scrambled, Original, and Repeated Scrambled conditions in a single scan run. The conditions were separated by a 30 s fixated rest. No behavioral response was collected during the scan.