Estimating the cortex-wide overlap between wordless narrative scene comprehension, reading comprehension, and topological visual, auditory, and somatomotor maps

Previous imaging research in scene comprehension has mostly focussed on isolated scenes and objects. Here we use narrative picture stimuli and a novel controlled presentation technique to identify the full extent of activation during naturalistic narrative scene comprehension. We then situate it with respect to topologically-mapped sensory and motor regions as well as cortical regions activated during naturalistic narrative reading comprehension. The data for all experiments was obtained from the same set of subjects, and analyzed using cortical surface based methods from start to finish. The results suggest that scene and reading activations are spread across occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal cortex, and largely aligned with each other. Within these regions, there were also sites uniquely activated when subjects were engaged in either narrative scene comprehension or in reading comprehension. Finally, the cortical activations for both scene and reading comprehension contrasts substantially overlap topological cortical maps, specifically retinotopic and tonotopic maps in occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal cortex.