Virtual fMRI brown bag: April 30, 2021

Please join us for a talk given by Claire Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in Uri Hasson's lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Time: 12:00-1:00pm

Place: Zoom - link distributed via email

Relating the past with the present: Information integration and segregation during ongoing narrative processing

Abstract: It has been consistently shown that human brains can integrate information over multiple contiguous events in real-life stories, but how does  the brain integrate related events that are mixed in with unrelated events? To answer this question, I collected fMRI data when people listened to a story that demands the separation and integration of multiple narrative threads. This custom-designed story has two independent storylines, interleaving across minute-long segments (ABAB). In the last (C) part, characters from the two storylines meet and their shared history is revealed. Part C is embedded with narrative motifs from the two storylines, to induce the spontaneous recall of past events and to shed new light on them. In this talk, I will show that storyline- and motif-specific neural patterns were reinstated as a function of current input, i.e. at storyline transition and upon the recurrence of motifs. I will also provide evidence for the role of the reactivated memory in information integration over intervening irrelevant events. Finally, I will discuss whether hippocampus-mediated episodic memory was involved in the reactivation of storyline information.