Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Story Comprehension

Understanding a story involves a constant interplay of the accumulation of narratives and its integration into a coherent structure. This study characterizes cognitive state dynamics during story comprehension and the corresponding network-level reconfiguration of the whole brain. We presented movie clips of temporally scrambled sequences, eliciting fluctuations in subjective feelings of understanding. An understanding occurred when processing events with high causal relations to previous events. Functional neuroimaging results showed that, during moments of understanding, the brain entered into a functionally integrated state with increased activation in the default mode network (DMN). Large-scale neural state transitions were synchronized across individuals who comprehended the same stories, with increasing occurrences of the DMN-dominant state. The time-resolved functional connectivities predicted changing cognitive states, and the predictive model was generalizable when tested on new stories. Taken together, these results suggest that the brain adaptively reconfigures its interactive states as we construct narratives to causally coherent structures.