INVESTIGATING GLOBAL COHERENCE IN NARRATIVE TEXT WITH FMRI METHODOLOGY

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The purpose of this study is to address the differences in brain activation patterns between reading narrative texts that are inconsistent across longer spans and narrative texts that are consistent across longer spans. Behavioral research has shown that readers' reaction times slow down when they encounter such an inconsistency in a text (O'Brien et al., 1993). Converging evidence from fMRI methodology would aide in understanding how narrative texts are processed by locating which brain regions are activated during the inconsistent versus consistent information. Specifically, we expect greater activation in the prefrontal cortex in the inconsistent version if participants are trying to resolve the inconsistency in the text, which would explain the reading time difference in the O'Brien et al. (1993) study. Alternatively, if there is not greater activation in the prefrontal cortex, then the regions involved when reading inconsistent information across longer spans of text would differ from the regions involved when reading inconsistent information across shorter spans of text (Sieborger, Ferstl, & von Crammon, 2007). In addition to the prefrontal cortex, we expect to examine differences in activation between the consistent and inconsistent texts in the dorsal fronto-medial cortex (Ferstl et al., 2005), left lateral frontal cortex (Kiehl, Laurens, & Liddle, 2002), left posterior fusiform gyrus (Kiehl, Laurens, & Liddle, 2002) and precuneous regions (based on our pilot data).