Shifts in neural representations, not gaze, track how people reinterpret ambiguous social scenes
How do we come to "see" the same thing differently after hearing someone else's perspective? Revising an interpretation could reflect changes in how the brain represents the meaning of what we see, changes in how we visually sample the input, or both. To disentangle these mechanisms, we developed MindLibs, an adaptive fMRI and eye-tracking paradigm in which participants generate interpretations…
How does one's perception of a scene change when presented with another person's viewpoint? Understanding this shift could involve alterations in the brain's representation of meaning, visual input sampling, or a combination of both. To distinguish between these factors, researchers created MindLibs, an adaptable fMRI and eye-tracking system.
Participants generated interpretations of ambiguous images and then observed alternative interpretations in real-time, with varying semantic content from their original views. When exposed to semantically distinct alternatives, reinterpretation correlated strongly with representational shifts in the brain's association cortex, but not with changes in gaze.
Specifically, alterations in lateral default-mode network regions (DMN-B) predicted reinterpretation independently of shifts in frontoparietal, attention, and visual networks, as well as changes in gaze itself. Conversely, shifts in visual cortex only tracked reinterpretation when gaze also shifted, and did not provide any additional information beyond what DMN-B offered.
These findings suggest that higher-order conceptual reconfiguration, rather than perceptual resampling, is the primary driver behind how individuals reinterpret the meaning of an ambiguous scene.
Written by urgent.news from bioRxiv's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
