How can the research on cortical topography and connectivity fingerprint shed light on the neural processing of event segmentation? – A commentary on Wu et al. (2025)

Abstract

The angular gyrus (AG) is widely implicated in language, memory, multisensory perception, and has been found to be a hub of connectivity. However, different strands of research on AG functions and structures have seldom been integrated. Recent event segmentation research, including Wu et al. (2025), shows that the AG robustly encodes event boundaries during spoken narratives, with stronger and more reliable involvement than the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). This commentary situates such findings within broader insights from connectomic fingerprints and cortical topography – using the contrast between AG and PCC as an example – to suggest that different regions' topographic juxtaposition and connectivity pattern may underlie their differential roles in representing event structure across modalities. Integrating perspectives from research on event segmentation and the brain connectome offers new avenues for understanding how the brain encodes continuous streams of information from vision, hearing, and action to form a coherent experience.