TY - JOUR
T1 - Shared understanding of narratives is correlated with shared neural responses
AU - Nguyen, Mai
AU - Vanderwal, Tamara
AU - Hasson, Uri
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - Humans have a striking ability to infer meaning from even the sparsest and most abstract forms of narratives. At the same time, flexibility in the form of a narrative is matched by inherent ambiguity in its interpretation. How does the brain represent subtle, idiosyncratic differences in the interpretation of abstract and ambiguous narratives? In this fMRI study, subjects were scanned either watching a novel 7-min animation depicting a complex narrative through the movement of geometric shapes, or listening to a narration of the animation's social story. Using an intersubject representational similarity analysis that compared interpretation similarity and neural similarity across subjects, we found that the more similar two people's interpretations of the abstract shapes animation were, the more similar were their neural responses in regions of the default mode network (DMN) and fronto-parietal network. Moreover, these shared responses were modality invariant: the shapes movie and the verbal interpretation of the movie elicited shared responses in linguistic areas and a subset of the DMN when subjects shared interpretations. Together, these results suggest a network of high-level regions that are not only sensitive to subtle individual differences in narrative interpretation during naturalistic conditions, but also resilient to large differences in the modality of the narrative.
AB - Humans have a striking ability to infer meaning from even the sparsest and most abstract forms of narratives. At the same time, flexibility in the form of a narrative is matched by inherent ambiguity in its interpretation. How does the brain represent subtle, idiosyncratic differences in the interpretation of abstract and ambiguous narratives? In this fMRI study, subjects were scanned either watching a novel 7-min animation depicting a complex narrative through the movement of geometric shapes, or listening to a narration of the animation's social story. Using an intersubject representational similarity analysis that compared interpretation similarity and neural similarity across subjects, we found that the more similar two people's interpretations of the abstract shapes animation were, the more similar were their neural responses in regions of the default mode network (DMN) and fronto-parietal network. Moreover, these shared responses were modality invariant: the shapes movie and the verbal interpretation of the movie elicited shared responses in linguistic areas and a subset of the DMN when subjects shared interpretations. Together, these results suggest a network of high-level regions that are not only sensitive to subtle individual differences in narrative interpretation during naturalistic conditions, but also resilient to large differences in the modality of the narrative.
KW - Cross-modal
KW - Individual differences
KW - Inter-subject correlation
KW - Naturalistic
KW - fMRI
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.010
DO - 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.010
M3 - Article
C2 - 30217543
AN - SCOPUS:85053446414
SN - 1053-8119
VL - 184
SP - 161
EP - 170
JO - Neuroimage
JF - Neuroimage
ER -