Neural Architecture of Event Comprehension

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Much of the text we read or hear has a narrative component. Examples include stories, novels, biographies, instructions for putting things together, and recipes. Narratives may be segmented into meaningful units called events, and the structure of events is critical for narrative comprehension. To adequately comprehend a narrative, readers must delineate successive events and assemble them into a meaningful whole. The broad goal of the proposed research is to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms by which narratives are segmented into meaningful events during comprehension. Research on narrative comprehension shows that changes in dimensions such as space and time affect long term memory representations. These same changes can affect the updating of working memory during reading or listening, and affect reading rate. Research on event perception shows how an ongoing stream of activity can be segmented into meaningful units. Our hypothesis is that the mechanisms readers and listeners use when identifying events in narratives are similar to those they use when identifying events in real life. The proposed research brings methods and theory from event perception to bear on narrative comprehension. One series of experiments aims to characterize how readers and listeners use features of narrative texts to identify event boundaries. A second series tests the hypothesis that perceptual event structure guides reading by modulating the contents of working memory. In both sets of experiments, converging behavioral and neurophysiological techniques will be used. We believe that an integrated cognitive neuroscience approach has the potential for significant progress on these questions--particularly because there have been very few neuroscientific studies of the larger structure of narrative thus far.