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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Prospective Planning and Retrospective Integration: Distinct Neural Signatures of Future and Past in Naturalistic Conversations

Itamar Jalon¹, Gidon Peeper¹, Haocheng Wang¹, Zaid Zada¹, Bobbi Aubrey¹, ARNAB BHATTACHARJEE¹, Samuel Nastase², Ariel Goldstein³, Orrin Devinsky⁴, Adeen Flinker⁵, Uri Hasson⁶; ¹Princeton University, ²University of Southern California, ³Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ⁴NYU Langone, ⁵New York University, ⁶Weizmann Institute of Science

Presenter: Itamar Jalon

In natural conversations, the past, present, and future are inextricably entangled, with each word shaped by the preceding context and, in turn, influencing what follows. This study disentangles the neural signals associated with immediate word content from those supporting contextual memory (past) and planning or prediction (future). We recorded intracranial EEG during spontaneous conversations. Encoding models predicted brain activations using nonoverlapping information about the conversational past (sentence embeddings), present (word embedding), and future (sentence embeddings). Our results captured distinct neural signals for single words, memory, planning and prediction varying in their times and location. Overall, speech comprehension appears to involve sustained processing of the conversational past, while speech production emphasizes strong representations of the conversational future. Planning of upcoming words was most pronounced in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The study takes a step toward clarifying the underlying dynamic processes that support natural conversations.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing