'Sherlock' and the case of narrative perception
"We're interested in examining how we take the kind of continuous environment that we all live in and break it into pieces that we can understand and remember," says Chris Baldassano (@ChrisBaldassano), a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the study's first author. "The main finding of this paper is that we can actually observe what's going on in the brain during this chunking behavior and see that it's happening on a lot of different temporal scales, from seconds up to minutes." The study made use of two different fMRI datasets, both of which were collected for other research. In the first experiment, participants watched part of the first episode of the BBC show "Sherlock" while being scanned with fMRI. A second group of participants listened to an audio description of the same episode while being scanned. (The research team, led by Uri Hasson and Kenneth Norman, professors in the Department of...