Poster B73, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Cultural background shapes brain activity and associations elicited during listening to a narrative
Maria Hakonen1, Arsi Ikäheimonen1, Annika Húlten1, Janne Kauttonen1, Miika Koskinen2, Fa-Hsuan Lin3, Anastasia Lowe1, Mikko Sams1, Iiro Jääskelainen1;1Aalto University School of Science, 2University of Helsinki, 3University of Toronto
Introduction The interpretation of a narrative can vary between individuals based on the differences in listers’ previous experiences. People from the same culture tend to share more similar experiences, values, believes and attitudes. We hypothesized that cultural differences in familial background shape how the brain processes a narrative, as well as how the narrative is interpreted. Methods We recruited 48 healthy volunteers who were fluent in Finnish. Half of the subjects had parents with a Finnish cultural background, whereas the other half had one or both parents from a Russian cultural background. The subjects listened to a 71-min narrative during ultra-fast fMRI. The narrative told a story of two protagonists, one with a Finnish and the other with a Russian background. Afterward, the narrative was replayed in 101 segments, and the subjects were asked produce associations related to the previous segment for 20-30 sec to describe what had been on their minds while they had heard the story in the fMRI scanner. Between-subject similarities of brain hemodynamic activity were estimated using inter-subject correlation analysis. The similarity in how the narrative was interpreted was estimated by comparing the semantic relatedness of the associated words across the two groups in a semantic space (Word2Vec) generated from a large internet text corpora. Results The cosine similarity of the associated words in the semantic space was different between the two groups. Further, there were between-group differences in the inter-subject correlation of brain hemodynamic activity in the left superior temporal gyrus and Heschl’s gyrus, as well as in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, and precuneus. Conclusions Our results suggest that even subtle cultural differences in the familial background shape how a person interprets a narrative and how their brains process it. The brain loci of differences in inter-subject correlation suggest that cultural familial background modulates processing of words and sentences, processing of the information accumulated across the narrative as well as mental imagery elicited by the narrative.
Themes: Speech Perception, Perception: Auditory
Method: Functional Imaging