NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION

Song, H., Park, B. Y., Park, H., & Shim, W. M. (2021). Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Story Comprehension.  Journal of Neuroscience, 41, 8972-8990.   Link

Understanding stories

Story understanding represents a real-world process of information accumulation and integration, where higher levels of story understanding are achieved by integrating the accumulated narrative information into a coherent structure. As subjects watch movies inside a scanner, we investigate how changes in one’s level of understanding are represented as dynamic reconfiguration of whole brain functional networks. Using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, we seek to predict evolving levels of understanding using time-resolved neural signatures. In particular, we investigate how the memory of causally-related previous events are spontaneously reinstated when processing the events of the present moment.

Reconstruction of stories in memory

Even when everyone encounters the same story, the interpretations may differ across individuals. Likewise, an ability to understand complex stories may intrinsically differ across individuals. Using fMRI and natural language processing, we seek to find the neural signatures that underlie such individual differences in story understanding. We are decoding trajectories of real-world thoughts as we continuously update situational contexts of the story.

Social prediction within naturalistic social context

As apt social agents, we constantly predict others’ states and actions for successful interactions with them by tracking numerous types of social information. Using fMRI and computational models, we investigate social information processing in the human brain while watching movies with rich social information. The narrative structures in movies provide predictive power over social events and enable us to track social content.

Context transition during free speaking

While humans think spontaneously, their thoughts can sometimes leap to new topics, indicating a change in context. As participants freely spoke their though inside a MRI scanner, we investigate how context transitions in continuous internal thoughts are represented as neural dynamics.