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Poster A45 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Map-like Representations of Lexical Features during Movie Watching
Siyang Li1 (), Huang Zhang1, Xia Liang2, Yu Zhang1, Tianzi Jiang3; 1Zhejiang Lab, Yuhang District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, 2Laboratory for Space Environment and Physical Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China, 3Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Growing focus has converged on how the brain responses to naturalistic stimuli, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Cognitive map theory proposes that human memory encodes external information internally by establishing relationships between experience fragments. In this study, we investigated brain’s cognitive map-like representations during movie watching and their alignment with the lexical characteristics of movie dialogue. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we uncovered two brain states with dynamic alternations between internal (State 1) and external (State 2) focuses during movie watching. Specifically, State 1 was characterized by more globally organized internal representations and exhibited continuous learning of lexical features, mirroring the modular structures of lexical network. In contrast, State 2 was primarily engaged in the sensory processing of external stimuli. Using successor representation (SR) technique, we recognized typical place fields in brain state spaces, and demonstrated a significant association between the predictive skewness of the SR field and individual vocabulary comprehension capacity. Our findings offer novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of naturalistic stimuli in the human brain, and support to the involvement of cognitive map theory in lexical feature encoding.
Keywords: naturalistic stimuli cognitive map lexical feature predictive representation