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A study of low-frequency brain activity during narrative processing and rest.

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Helen Mengxuan Wu^1,2 (), Jiayi Jiang^1,3, Madeleine Grace Cornejo Carrillo^1,2, Jonas T. Kaplan^1,2; ¹Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, ²Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, ³Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

Narrative processing and autobiographical thought during rest both unfold across multiple timescales over extended periods. Understanding their neural mechanisms can reveal how the brain integrates moment-to-moment experiences into a coherent and unified sense of self and world. To investigate this, we conducted voxel-wise analyses of Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations (ALFF) and fractional ALFF (fALFF) on two fMRI datasets: (1) 3T data from 35 participants with one resting-state and two story-listening sessions, and (2) 7T data from 20 participants with one resting-state and one movie-watching session. The narratives differed in themes and emotional conflicts. ALFF measures BOLD signal fluctuations within 0.01–0.08 Hz, while fALFF reflects their proportion relative to the total BOLD signal. For each participant, ALFF and fALFF maps were computed for resting-state and narrative-processing scans and compared using two-tailed paired-sample t-tests. Previous studies have reported high ALFF and fALFF values in the default-mode and sensory networks at rest. In this study, we focused on identifying brain regions that exhibited even stronger low-frequency activity during narrative processing compared to rest. In dataset 1, narrative processing elicited higher ALFF for one story and higher fALFF for both stories in the superior temporal sulcus. In dataset 2, although fALFF showed no significant effects, narrative processing produced higher ALFF in the superior temporal gyrus, Heschl’s gyrus, and medial inferior temporal cortex. Together, these results suggest that sensory processing and integration areas across modalities exhibit enhanced low-frequency activity during narrative processing, indicating their role in combining brief sensory inputs into coherent meaning.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Other