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Does shared lived experience shape neural responses to language?
Poster Session E, Friday, October 2, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Aline-Priscillia Messi1, Nadia Hoffmann1, Liina Pylkkanen1; 1New York University
The increasing use of narrative stimuli like audiobooks or podcasts has made it clear that semantic processing is deeply influenced by context. However, context extends beyond words and sentences: our personal context—who we are as individuals—also shapes language processing. Recent studies show that neural responses to stories become more similar among friends (Parkinson et al., 2018-NatCommun), people sharing a nationality (Hakkonen et al., 2022-BrainSci), or those with similar story interpretations (Nguyen et al., 2019-NeuroImage). Underlying these broader social and experiential factors are individual personal experiences. How such experiences shape internal representations during language processing remains unknown. We investigated how personal history shapes the way we engage with narratives by evaluating whether greater lived experience with a narrative topic leads to more shared responses. 33 participants read one of two personal essays by the same author about serious medical conditions (cancer or miscarriage) while MEG was recorded. Stories were presented in visual 2-4 word chunks and counterbalanced between participants. After reading, participants shared story-related associations and recalled the story to the best of their ability. They also completed an exit survey assessing prior personal experiences with medical conditions using a custom scale we developed, probing e.g. how many people close to them have been affected, diagnosis recency, and emotional impact. We validated the scale in a separate sample (n=150) against existing PTSD and life-event appraisal scales. Survey responses were used to create a composite “personal experience score” across medical conditions. We derived topic distributions for participants’ free recalls and associations with BERTopic. We then fit a multilevel model testing whether similarity in experience predicted similarity in responses to and connections with the stimuli. Behavioral results showed that similarity in prior experience drove similarity in personal associations: participants with more similar experiences showed greater overlap in topic distributions. We then used Inter-Subject Representational Similarity Analysis to test when experience drove similarity in neural responses. The model compared participants using their ‘personal experience score’ and identified when and where participants with similar experiences showed similar responses to the story. Across stories and across the analysis window (50-750ms), shared personal experience led to neural synchrony in language, emotion and memory-related regions. Personal experience correlated with a broad range of bilateral language regions including the middle temporal lobe, inferior frontal gyrus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as well as left-lateralized language areas like the temporal pole. Shared experience also led to synchrony in bilateral parahippocampal gyri, insula and orbitofrontal cortices. Additionally, we found that dissimilar experiences correlated with activity in bilateral supramarginal gyri, superior parietal regions as well as the left somato-motor cortex and right precuneus. Most psychological research depends on the assumption that despite our individual differences, underlying cognitive and neural processes are similar enough to establish group-level conclusions. We successfully quantified personal lived experience and showed that it drives similarity in areas typically associated with language processing, as well as those linked to long-term memory and emotion, alongside idiosyncratic responses in bilateral parietal and sensory-motor regions.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,