Cognitive map-like representations of semantic structure during movie watching

COEX 

Neuroscience aims to unravel the link between cognition and neural activity, with a growing focus on how the brain represents naturalistic stimuli like movie-watching (Kringelbach, Perl et al. 2023). Studies shown that the brain segments continuous stimuli into discrete events and forms narrative graphs, impacting memory performance in behaviors (Lee and Chen 2022). However, the precise characterization and neural representations of such naturalistic information in the human brain remains unclear. This study investigates cognitive map-like brain representations during movie watching, based on the theory that the brain encodes and organizes experiences in a relational map (Tolman 1948, Behrens, Muller et al. 2018). In this study, we explored the cognitive map-like representations in the brain during movie watching and their convergence with the underlying semantic structure of movie lines.