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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Moving beyond the stimulus to encode subjective narrative experience in the human brain

Sushmita Sadhukha¹, Nir Jacoby¹, Eshin Jolly², Luke Chang¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of California, San Diego

Presenter: Sushmita Sadhukha

Many of us feel moments of deep personal connection during narrative experiences. Yet most neuroimaging approaches treat the stimulus as the primary driver of neural activity, leaving the listener’s idiosyncratic contribution largely understudied. Here, we created a generalizable pipeline for operationalizing subjective narrative experience as a continuous, participant-specific neural predictor. We ask whether the subjective dimensions of narrative experience can be captured in brain activity alongside stimulus-driven features. Using fMRI, we had participants (N=99) listen to naturalistic autobiographical narratives and provide open-ended annotations of their internal states post-scan. We constructed participant-specific, continuous feature spaces from these annotations using collaborative filtering, and fit banded ridge regression models predicting whole-brain BOLD activity from both stimulus-driven (language) and subjective feature spaces. This work offers a framework for incorporating subjective experience into neural models of narrative comprehension.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding