Narrative ‘twist’ shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features

Given the same input, one’s understanding of that input can differ based on contextual knowledge. Where and how does the brain represent latent mental frameworks that interact with incoming sensory information to shape subjective interpretations? In this study, participants listened to the same auditory narrative twice; the narrative had a plot twist in the middle that dramatically shifted interpretations of the story. Using a robust within-subject whole-brain approach, we leveraged shifts in neural activity between the two listens to identify where latent representations are updated and, by extension, where interpretations are instantiated in the brain. We considered the story in terms of the broader narrative model and two specific components, episodes and characters. Neural activity patterns varied with participants’ latent understanding of these three elements in overlapping but partially distinct sets of temporal, parietal, and prefrontal regions. Results suggest that even when the sensory information and the individual are held constant, heteromodal cortex represents individual narrative elements according not to their surface features, but to latent conceptual frameworks for understanding and interpreting narrative information.