Life doesn’t arrive in neat chapters. It flows, one conversation bleeding into the next, one thought quietly reshaping the one that follows. Yet our brains do something remarkable: they preserve a sense of continuity while also breaking experience into meaningful events. How this balance works has long puzzled cognitive scientists.

A new study led by Dr. Shira Baror and Dr. Aya Ben-Yakov of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offers fresh insight into this fundamental question.

The researchers set out to understand whether two core mental elements, our sense of continuity and the segmentation of experience, are driven by the same underlying mechanism or by separate systems working in parallel.

On one hand, the brain represents the continuity of experience through a phenomenon known as serial dependence: our current perceptions are subtly pulled toward what we have just seen or decided. This helps stabilize perception in a noisy world. On the other hand, the brain is constantly segmenting experience, marking boundaries when something meaningful changes, such as a new setting, task, or context, so memories can be organized and stored.

From a predictive, Bayesian view of the brain, these processes could be two sides of the same coin: continuity reflecting successful predictions, and segmentation emerging when predictions fail. But is that really how the mind works?

To find out, the team conducted three large-scale experiments involving 816 participants, while presenting different pictorial images and systematically manipulating their context. The results revealed a nuanced picture.

Contextual boundaries, such as changes in task or background, were enough to disrupt serial dependence between the images, even when nothing about the context’s sensory information itself had changed. At the same time, these boundaries shaped memory in ways that closely resemble how we naturally divide experiences into events.

Yet the story didn’t end there. While both perception and memory were clearly influenced by context, the effects of boundaries on perception and on memory showed distinct patterns, and individual differences in these effects did not reliably align.

The findings suggest that while processes that maintain continuity and segmentation are both deeply sensitive to context, they may not be governed by a single, unified predictive system. Instead, continuity and segmentation may draw on partly distinct mechanisms, each shaped by context in its own way.

“Understanding how the brain balances stability with change goes to the heart of how we experience the world,” the researchers note. “Our results show that context plays a central role—but the full story of how these processes interact is still unfolding.”

As scientists continue to explore how the mind stitches moments together, and decides when to pull them apart, this research brings us one step closer to understanding how experience itself is constructed.