ArticleLanguage, cognition and neuroscience2020
Discourse-level comprehension engages medial frontal Theory of Mind brain regions even for expository texts.
Article in Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Parallel Architecture: From Problems and Mysteries to Solutions and Explanations.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Context modulates brain state dynamics and behavioral responses during narrative comprehension.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Linguistic inputs must be syntactically parsable to fully engage the language network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Dissociating language and thought in large language models.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Predicting the next sentence (not word) in large language models: What model-brain alignment tells us about discourse comprehension.Science advances · 2024Article
- The language network as a natural kind within the broader landscape of the human brain.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Seeing inferences: brain dynamics and oculomotor signatures of non-verbal deduction.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Similar neural networks respond to coherence during comprehension and production of discourse.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Probabilistic atlas for the language network based on precision fMRI data from >800 individuals.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Differential Tracking of Linguistic vs. Mental State Content in Naturalistic Stimuli by Language and Theory of Mind (ToM) Brain Networks.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Article
- Theory of mind, mental state talk, and discourse comprehension: Theory of mind process is more important for narrative comprehension than for informational text comprehension.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2021Article
- Incremental Language Comprehension Difficulty Predicts Activity in the Language Network but Not the Multiple Demand Network.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Brain network reconfiguration for narrative and argumentative thought.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Modeling Within-Item Dependencies in Parallel Data on Test Responses and Brain Activation.Psychometrika · 2021Article
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Abstract
In addition to understanding individual word meanings and processing the syntactic and semantic dependencies among those words within a sentence, language comprehension often requires constructing a higher-order discourse structure based on the relationships among clauses and sentences in the extended context. Prior fMRI studies of discourse-level comprehension have reported greater activation for texts than unconnected sentences in what-appear-to-be regions of the Theory of Mind (ToM) network. However, those studies have generally used narratives rich in mental state content, thus confounding coherence and content. We report an fMRI experiment where ToM regions were defined functionally in each participant, and their responses were examined to texts vs. sentence lists. Critically, we used expository texts to minimize mental state content. Medial frontal but not posterior ToM regions exhibited small but reliable increases in their responses to texts relative to unconnected sentences, suggesting a role for these regions in discourse comprehension independent of content.
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