Shared understanding of narratives is correlated with shared neural responses.

ABSTRACT: 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, th

SUBMITTER: Nguyen M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6287615 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature