Unraveling the Neural Mechanisms of Episodic Memory and Communication for Naturalistic Narratives

Coraline Rinn Iordan

Assistant Professor; Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Neuroscience, and Center of Visual Science

University of Rochester

Our world unfolds in stories. There are stories we experience personally, stories we tell each other, and stories we tell ourselves. But how does our prior knowledge influence the way we perceive and remember stories? How do we use attention to select the most relevant information to focus on and remember from stories? How do we briefly summarize long and complicated stories in a few sentences? In this talk, I will discuss a couple of ongoing studies that seek to elucidate how we perceive, remember, and communicate the complex narratives that we encounter when we experience the world naturally, such as when we watch a captivating movie or when we talk to our friends about our adventures. I will also briefly explore a framework for investigating the causal link between how we remember and communicate naturalistic narratives and the neural mechanisms that support these tasks. This framework leverages neural sculpting, a recent method we developed using machine learning, neuroimaging, and real-time neurofeedback to access and alter human subjective experience by directly modifying activity patterns in the brain related to vision and memory in a non-invasive way. Our work provides insights into multiple mechanisms of naturalistic perception and memory that are central to human cognition and social interaction in everyday situations and, as such, has implications for several key endeavors of the human experience, including teaching, cooperation, and building consensus between multiple minds.