Towards an ecologically valid naturalistic cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory and event cognition: A literature review and synthesis

The landscape of human memory and event cognition research has witnessed atransformative journey toward the use of naturalistic contexts and tasks. In this review, wetrack this progression from abrupt, artificial stimuli used in extensively controlledlaboratory experiments to more naturalistic tasks and stimuli that present a more faithfulrepresentation of the real world. We argue that in order to improve ecological validity,naturalistic study designs must consider the complexity of the cognitive phenomenon beingstudied. Then, we review the current state of "naturalistic" event segmentation studies andcritically assess frequently employed movie stimuli. We evaluate recently developed toolslike lifelogging and other extended reality technologies to help address the challenges weidentified with existing naturalistic approaches. We conclude by offering some guidelinesthat can be used to design ecologically valid cognitive neuroscience studies of memory andevent cognition.