Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest

January 26, 2009 By Gerry Everding
Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest

Enlarge

Click the brain scans to view a color-coded chart describing changes in brain activation during the reading of a brief narrative.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

"Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story," says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

"These results suggest that readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing," says Speer, now a research associate with The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Mental Health Program in Boulder, Colo. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."

In addition to Zacks, an associate professor of psychology in Arts and Sciences and of radiology in the School of Medicine at WUSTL, other co-authors for this study are Jeremy R. Reynolds, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver in Denver, Colo.; and Khena M. Swallow, a post-doctoral associate in psychology at the University of Minnesota. Reynolds, Swallow and Speer all graduated from the psychology doctoral program at WUSTL in the last several years.

Reading, one of the most important skills human beings can acquire, has been difficult to study using fMRI because researchers seldom have access to expensive scanning equipment for long periods of time. Reading long passages of text also poses challenges because participants must remain very still for the scans to be effective. In an effort to minimize eye movements, participants are immobilized within the brain-scanning device and presented with text one-word-at-a-time on an adjacent computer screen.

Previous research has shown that when people read isolated words or phrases involving vivid visual or motor contents, brain activity in sensory and motor brain regions specifically related to those contents increased. But this result might not be typical of normal reading — in the previous studies there was no story to try to understand, and participants sometimes had to make an explicit judgment about each word or phrase. In this study, Speer and colleagues used fMRI to look for evidence of mental simulation during the reading of extended stories. Each participant read four stories of less than 1500 words excerpted from a simple, 1940s-era book about the daily activities of a young boy. Participants were shown text passages on a computer screen that displayed one word at a time; reading all four stories took most participants about 40 minutes.

The researchers had carefully coded the stories so that they knew when important features of the story were changing. The features had been chosen based on previous studies of narrative reading, and were known to be important for comprehension. The researchers hypothesized that some brain regions would increase at several different feature changes, but that other brain regions would be selectively activated by only one feature change. This is what was found.

For example, changes in the objects a character interacted with (e.g., "pulled a light cord") were associated with increases in a region in the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went through the front door into the kitchen") were associated with increases in regions in the temporal lobes that are selectively activate when people view pictures of spatial scenes.

Overall, the data supported the view that readers construct mental simulations of events when reading stories.

The Speer et al. paper extends results reported by this group previously in Psychological Science. In the previous study, the researchers asked readers to divide the stories into meaningful events after reading them in the MRI scanner. The researchers then asked which parts of the brain increased in activity at event boundaries. The mental simulation results reported here line up strikingly with those regions. This suggests that readers construct a mental simulation as they read, and then divide that simulation into meaningful events when important features change.

Provided by Washington University in St. Louis

4.8 /5 (10 votes)  

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

gmurphy
Jan 26, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
this is why the book of a story is usually so much better than the movie.
Rank 4.8 /5 (10 votes)
Relevant PhysicsForums posts
  • "The end of diseases" by David Agus, interview from Daily Show with Jon Stewart
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Oncolytic adenovirus
    createdFeb 04, 2012
  • Nutrition label stuffs and diets
    createdFeb 02, 2012
  • Lowe syndrom genetic test
    createdFeb 02, 2012
  • Bill Doyle: Treating cancer with electric fields
    createdFeb 01, 2012
  • Colonoscopy - which drugs are better?
    createdJan 31, 2012
  • More from Physics Forums - Medical Sciences

More news stories

Discovery predicts patient sensitivity to important drug target in deadly brain cancer

A recent discovery by Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) scientists enables the prediction of patient sensitivity to proposed drug therapies for glioblastoma – the most common and most aggressive malignant brain tumor ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 11 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

New study finds individual differences in anthrax susceptibility

Susceptibility to anthrax toxin is a heritable genetic trait that may vary tremendously among individuals, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Medicine & Health / Genetics

created 12 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

It's not solitaire: Brain activity differs when one plays against others

Researchers have found a way to study how our brains assess the behavior – and likely future actions – of others during competitive social interactions. Their study, described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to use a ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created 15 hours ago | popularity 4.8 / 5 (5) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Exercise triggers stem cells in muscle

University of Illinois researchers determined that an adult stem cell present in muscle is responsive to exercise, a discovery that may provide a link between exercise and muscle health. The findings could lead to new therapeutic ...

Medicine & Health / Research

created 15 hours ago | popularity 4.7 / 5 (6) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Study identifies new prostate cancer drug target

Research led by Wanguo Liu, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has identified a new protein critical to the development and growth of prostate cancer. The findings are published ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created 12 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0 | with audio podcast


Nicira promises virtual networks will transform networking

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the past four years, founders of the start-up company Nicira have been developing cutting-edge software that they predict will transform the networking technology underlying the Internet. ...

Navy to begin tests on electromagnetic railgun prototype launcher

The Office of Naval Research (ONR)'s Electromagnetic (EM) Railgun program will take an important step forward in the coming weeks when the first industry railgun prototype launcher is tested at a facility ...

Study of diving beetles suggest sperm evolution may be driven by changes in female reproductive organs

Studying female reproductive tracts and sperm in diving beetles (Dytiscidae), researchers from the University of Arizona and Syracuse University have obtained a glimpse into a bizarre and amazing world of spe ...

Fossil cricket: Jurassic love song reconstructed

Some 165 million years ago, the world was host to a diversity of sounds. Primitive bushcrickets and croaking amphibians were among the first animals to produce loud sounds by stridulation (rubbing certain body parts together). ...

New insight from whole-genome sequencing of Europe's 2011 E. coli outbreaks

Using whole-genome sequencing, a team led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Broad Institute has traced the path of the E. coli outbreak that sickened thousands and killed over 50 people in Ger ...

Redder ladybirds more deadly, say scientists

A ladybird's colour indicates how well-fed and how toxic it is, according to an international team of scientists. Research led by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool directly shows that differences between ...