Illusory causal impression attenuates the detection of event boundaries

The art of film editing bridges the transitions between discrete events to build a coherent, immersive experience for viewers. However, how the brain integrates seemingly separate moments into a coherent whole remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that causal impression—even when illusory—acts as a powerful heuristic to attenuate the neural representation of event boundaries, thereby facilitating a smoother transition across events. Using high-resolution EEG, we presented 34 participants (24 women) with a sequence of images sourced from concatenated visual clips, where action-outcome continuity across the event boundary was manipulated to induce or break illusory causality. Behaviorally, we found that illusory causal impression delayed the detection of event boundaries. Neurally, this boundary attenuation effect was marked by a reduced N2 amplitude, indicating mitigated cognitive conflict associated with a context shift. Multivariate analyses further showed that this causal impression reshaped the event representation by increasing neural similarity between generic cross-boundary states, thereby overcoming the typical boundary-induced impairment of cross-event association. Critically, this neural representational change was linked to behavior: the greater and more stable the neural separability in posterior brain regions across the boundary, the faster participants detected the event change. These findings suggest that illusory causal impression mitigates event segmentation by maintaining more coherent neural patterns across the boundary, providing a neuroscientific basis for intuitive editing techniques used in filmmaking. Significance statement The human brain naturally segments the continuous flow of experience into distinct events. Yet, in cinema, continuity editing can make us perceive separate shots as a single, coherent reality. How the brain bridges these gaps is a fundamental question. Our study reveals that causal impression is a key heuristic for integrating discrete episodes. We show that when one action appears to cause an outcome across a visual cut—even if the link is illusory—the brain bridges the two moments, attenuating the perceptual boundary between them. These findings provide the neuroscientific basis for intuitive filmmaking techniques and uncover a core principle of how the brain constructs a seamless narrative from discrete pieces of information.