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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Summaries of Naturalistic Narratives Reflect Underlying Event Structure in Episodic Memory

Claire Sun¹, Coraline Rinn Iordan¹; ¹University of Rochester

Presenter: Claire Sun

Humans frequently summarize complex experiences, a process that requires the interplay of memory retrieval, content selection, and the construction of compressed, coherent narratives. Despite its prevalence, the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying summarization remain poorly understood. We hypothesize that summarization relies on identifying a set of core, highly informative events from the original narrative to be selectively prioritized during communication, predicated on the contextual constraints of the communicative act. To address this question, we ran two experiments, one behavioral and one neuroimaging (fMRI), where participants experienced a complex naturalistic narrative and were asked to summarize its contents, either without any constraints (free recall), or in a long (6-8 min), short (3-4 min), or brief (1 min) summary. As temporal constraints increased, participants produced increasingly compressed responses that prioritized a small common set of core events from the overall story structure (p<0.001). Furthermore, shorter summaries included more informative events, compared to longer summaries (p<0.001). Neutrally, the activity patterns corresponding to the summarized events underwent an increased restructuring based on the magnitude of the summarization constraint. Together, our results provide evidence that humans leverage the event structure of naturalistic narratives to generate efficient and informative summaries of their contents under varying communicative constraints.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures