Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Neural representations that resist interference

Xian Li¹, Christopher Honey¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

Presenter: Xian Li

How can we successfully return to a complex scenario after our thinking is interrupted? We hypothesize that an “episodic background” representation is constructed over time, and that this representation can passively persist through interruptions. In fMRI, participants listened to narrative stimuli that were interrupted (or not) by silent pauses or theory-of-mind tasks. When the story was interrupted by pauses, we observed reliable and story-selective dorsal posterior medial cortex (dPMC) patterns that persisted during the pauses. These intra-interruption dPMC patterns gradually shifted over the course of the narrative and predicted subsequent story understanding and memory. Moreover, similar dPMC patterns were detectable in participants who performed theory-of-mind tasks during interruption. These data are consistent with an episodic background process that can passively maintain evolving narrative context in the face of interference.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF