title: Personal experience with narrated events modulates functional connectivity within visual and motor systems during story comprehension.
abstract: Past experience of everyday life activities, which forms the basis of our knowledge about the world, greatly affects how we understand stories. Yet, little is known about how this influence is instantiated in the human brain. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how past experience facilitates functional connectivity during the comprehension of stories rich in perceptual and motor details. We found that comprehenders' past experience with the scenes and actions described in the narratives selectively modulated functional connectivity between lower- and higher-level areas within the neural systems for visual and motor processing, respectively. These intramodal interactions may play an important role in integrating personal knowledge about a narrated situation with an evolving discourse representation. This study provides empirical evidence consistent with the idea that regions related to visual and motor processing are involved in the reenactment of experience as proposed by theories of embodied cognition.
authors.affiliation: Language Section, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, 20892.
authors.forename: Ho Ming
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Chow
authors.forename: Raymond A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Mar
authors.forename: Yisheng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Siyuan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Suraji
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wagage
authors.forename: Allen R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Braun
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008016:Life Change Events; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D033262:Narration; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D012649:Self Concept; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: discourse; embodiment; knowledge; language; simulation