Neural Architecture of Event Comprehension

描述(由申请人提供)：我们读到或听到的大部分课文都有叙事成分。例子包括故事、小说、传记、拼装说明和食谱。叙事可以被分割成有意义的单位，称为事件，而事件的结构对叙事理解至关重要。为了充分理解叙事，读者必须描绘出连续的事件，并将它们组合成一个有意义的整体。这项研究的主要目标是调查在理解过程中，叙事被分割成有意义的事件的神经认知机制。关于叙事理解的研究表明，空间和时间等维度的变化会影响长时记忆表征。这些相同的变化会影响阅读或听力过程中工作记忆的更新，并影响阅读速度。对事件感知的研究表明，正在进行的活动流可以被分割成有意义的单元。我们的假设是，读者和听众在识别叙事中的事件时使用的机制类似于他们在识别现实生活中的事件时使用的机制。本研究将事件知觉的研究方法和理论引入到叙事理解中。一系列实验旨在描述读者和听者如何使用叙述性文本的特征来识别事件边界。第二个系列检验了知觉事件结构通过调节工作记忆的内容来指导阅读的假设。在这两组实验中，都将使用融合的行为和神经生理学技术。我们认为，一种综合的认知神经科学方法有可能在这些问题上取得重大进展--特别是因为到目前为止，关于叙事的更大结构的神经科学研究很少。

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.