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The Fundamental Role of Self-Reference in Multimodal and Dynamic Communicative Settings: An fMRI Study Using Movies
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Thivina Thanabalan1, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky1, Matthias Schlesewsky1; 1Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, University of South Australia
Unlike any other communication medium, language allows for self-related information to be externalised and communicated to others. In turn, when others express self-related information, we can infer the intended meaning based on our own experience as language users. Strikingly, previous psycholinguistic research suggests that the first-person (self) has a special status in comparison to non-first-person (other) references even when we are comprehending another person’s self-references. For example, Brilmayer et al. (2019) demonstrated that in contrast to other-references, self-references elicited electrophysiological responses that were unaffected by contextual factors in a naturalistic story. In the present study, we set out to expand on prior perspectives regarding the “self” by exploring how self and other references manifest in terms of functional neuroanatomy. To this end, we employed open-source functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data recorded while participants watched full length movies. Out of the 86 participants’ data made available by the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Database (Aliko et al., 2020), we selected data from 50 participants (24 females, aged= 19-58 years, M= 27.80, SD= 10.58) who watched one of four movies belonging to various genres (horror, romance, comedy and documentary). We annotated the selected movie transcripts with relevant linguistic features including first, second and third person pronouns and their importance in the discourse (topic status). Using these linguistic features as regressors of interest, we conducted whole-brain fMRI analyses to identify group-level self vs other contrast effects as well as topic main and interaction effects. Our findings revealed that, in contrast to self-references (I), second-person references (you) activated partly unimodal visual processing areas such as the occipital and calcarine gyri. By contrast, third person references (he, she) more strongly engaged an extensive cortical network comprising regions including the precentral gyri, cerebellum and putatively supramodal posterior temporal and inferior parietal areas. This suggests that self-reference can be regarded as a default in communication, with the processing of other reference types recruiting additional brain networks. Additional support for this view stems from the finding that whole-brain BOLD responses to self-reference tended to be close to baseline levels regardless of how important these references were in the discourse (i.e. regardless of their topic status). Self-reference thus appears to serve as an anchor point in an otherwise dynamic communicative setting. Our results provide further converging evidence for the fundamental role of self-reference in human interactions. They further indicate that this is implemented in neural terms through the dynamic recruitment of various additional networks for the processing of reference to others, possibly reflecting the added requirements of non-first-person perspective taking.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,