Shared understanding of narratives is correlated with shared neural responses

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 184; pp. 161 - 170
• Main Authors: Nguyen, Mai, Vanderwal, Tamara, Hasson, Uri
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.01.2019; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Animated films; Animation; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping; Communication; Comprehension - physiology; Cross-modal; Female; fMRI; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Humans; Individual differences; Inter-subject correlation; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Motion pictures; Narratives; Naturalistic; Pattern Recognition, Physiological - physiology; Photic Stimulation; Visual artists; Young Adult; fMRI; Naturalistic; Cross-modal; Inter-subject correlation; Individual differences
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.010

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, the more similar were their neural responses in regions of the default mode network (DMN) and fronto-parietal network. Moreover, these shared responses were modality invariant: the shapes movie and the verbal interpretation of the movie elicited shared responses in linguistic areas and a subset of the DMN when subjects shared interpretations. Together, these results suggest a network of high-level regions that are not only sensitive to subtle individual differences in narrative interpretation during naturalistic conditions, but also resilient to large differences in the modality of the narrative. •Shared narrative interpretation is correlated with neural similarity in DMN and FCPN.•Neural responses in DMN depend on shared interpretation, not stimulus modality.•Intersubject representation similarity analysis can detect individual differences.