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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
While verbal communication is a joint activity, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record neuronal responses from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speakerıs spatiotemporal brain responses to model listenersı brain responses and we find extensive speaker-listener coupling, which vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, while on average the listenersı brain responses mirror the speakerıs responses with a delay, we also find areas which exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the speaker-listener coupling, the greater the understanding. In particular, the extent of anticipatory couplings captures 50% of the behavioral variance. We argue that the observed interaction between production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.
Host: Information Science and Technology Center (ISTC), Garrett Kenyon, gkenyon@lanl.gov, 667-1900