Weaving a story: Narrative formation over prolonged time scales engages social cognition and frontoparietal networks

Abstract

Forming narratives is of key importance to human experience, enabling one to render large amounts of information into relatively compacted stories for future retrieval, giving meaning to otherwise fragmented occurrences. The neural mechanisms that underlie coherent narrative construction of causally connected information over prolonged temporal periods are yet unclear. Participants in this fMRI study observed consecutive scenes from a full-length movie either in their original order, enabling causal inferences over time, or in reverse order, impeding a key component of coherent narratives-causal inference. In between scenes, we presented short periods of blank screens for examining post-encoding processing effects. Using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) followed by seed-base correlation analysis, we hypothesized that networks involved in online monitoring of incoming information on the one hand, and offline processing of previous occurrences on the other would differ between the groups. We found that despite the exposure to the same scenes, the chronological-order condition exhibited enhanced functional connectivity in frontoparietal regions associated with information integration and working memory. The reverse-order condition yielded offline, post-scene coactivation of neural networks involved in social cognition and particularly theory of mind and action comprehension. These findings shed light on offline processes of narrative construction efforts, highlighting the role of social cognition networks in seeking for narrative coherence.

With food in mind

“…A gustometer is a MRI-compatible device using pumps to delivers small amounts of liquid foods to the participant's mouth through plastic tubing (e.g., Andersen et al, 2019;Canna et al, 2019;Christensen et al, 2022;Tord et al, 2021). Finally, functional connectivity mutivoxel pattern analsysis (fc-MVPA) could be used on fMRI data to study connectivity between multivoxel patterns in different regions (e.g., Assouline, 2023;Kahathuduwa et al, 2018;McNorgan et al, 2020;Richiardi et al, 2011;Smith, 2012;Wen et al, 2019). Notably, this approach could extend the MVPA results described in chapter 2 in two ways: first, by unravelling the hierachycal organization of brain regions involved in food reward processing (Hunt & Hayden, 2017;Zhang et al, 2021).…”