UC Santa Barbara

The impact of narratives is evident in various aspects of society, from literature and historical documents to scientific explanations, political speeches, and everyday conversations. Research has shown that how people interpret narratives can influence cognitive and linguistic behavior. This dissertation focuses on mental models constructed during movie-watching, a particular type of narrative experience. By analyzing multiple existing datasets and designing three studies, this dissertation offers a framework for investigating the role of narrational features in mental model constructions in the brain across three levels (micro, macro, and super) during movie viewing.The first study examines the contributions of narrative and narrational features to macro-level mental model construction in the brain. We found a significant relationship between narrational features and low-level brain regions but not between narrative features and high-level brain regions in the event segmentation results. These low-level regions may not be as sensitive to the specific details of the narrative features as they are to how the story is presented through the narrational features. The narrational features may provide cues or signals to the high-level brain regions, guiding their narrative interpretation. This is consistent with previous research that has found that how a story is told can significantly impact how it is perceived and remembered by audiences. The second study investigates how the brain reacts to narrative features, particularly moral-relevant content, while constructing micro-level mental models. We find consistent results across model that macro-events with more micro-events are more likely to have brain-data boundaries overlapped with human-annotated boundaries. However, our generalized linear models did not find evidence to support our hypothesis that higher levels of moral-relevant content would correspond to higher inter-subject correlations, indicating engagement. The third study investigates how the brain uses narrative and narrational features in super-level mental model construction, specifically in schema maintenance and violation. Our results showed that intra- and inter-subject correlations in the precuneus were significantly higher for the intact clip than for the scrambled clip, indicating the precuneus's involvement in schematic thinking during narrative processing, particularly in posterior medial regions. However, we did not find a significant relationship between inter-subject correlation (i.e., engagement) and the deviation of segments (broken schemas). Researchers in communication and media psychology can learn from the neurological component of this dissertation since it offers a biological perspective and methodological innovations to advance our understanding of narration and narrative effects in the brain. Next, the operationalization of narrative features and links between features or combinations of features and brain activity can be an exemplar for neuroscientists less familiar with media studies.