Neurocognitive Correlates of Narrative Processing in Children

Poster Session C - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Jessica Lammert¹ (jlammert@uwo.ca), Emiko Osborne¹, Blake Butler^1,2,3; ¹Western University, ²National Centre for Audiology, ³Children's Health Research Institute

Complex real-world environments like a typical classroom presents children with rich, multisensory stimulation where learning relies on cognitive skills such as attention, memory, and executive functions. For typically developing children this can, at times, be stressful and exhausting. However, children with learning disabilities face these challenges daily. Clinical measures often fail to capture the complexity of these environments and, thus, poorly characterize their inherent challenges. Accordingly, measures of how children engage with complex stimuli are needed. Narratives, such as films and books, require listeners to encode and retain information over long durations, and integrate this information with existing knowledge. By examining which brain regions are active while a child engages with narratives, and to what extent activity is correlated across individuals, we may better understand how children extract meaning from complex stimuli. To this end, we examined neural synchrony (a measure thought to represent shared experience) during movie-watching within a large and cognitively diverse sample of children and measured their comprehension of the stories. Participants also completed a battery of tests including standardized measures of intelligence, social responsiveness, and language skills. These cognitive skills were found to be uniquely predictive of neural synchrony in frontal, default-mode, occipital, and attention networks, suggesting that the development of different cognitive abilities underscores a child’s ability to understand complex narratives. The results of this work will inform how children engage with complex streams of information and suggest developmental milestones that predict how well children will succeed in environments like the modern classroom.

Topic Area: OTHER