Baldassano Christopher
Department of Psychology, Columbia University, 1190 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY, 10027, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2023 Oct 10;189:108664. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108664. Epub 2023 Aug 19.
Narrative stimuli offer a unique opportunity for research in cognitive neuroscience because they evoke cognitive processes that are difficult or impossible to study with traditional paradigms. An especially compelling feature of narratives is their temporal structure, which allows for meaningful predictions about upcoming events. As we proceed through a narrative, we can maintain a complex set of short- and long-term guesses about the future and continually refine our predictions as the story unfolds. Experiments using narratives can allow researchers to probe the ways in which memory systems are flexibly used during perception, including the mechanisms by which continuous experiences are segmented into discrete events. Despite the challenges of using narratives and other naturalistic stimuli in experimental research, these approaches offer a new window into critical components of real-world cognition.
叙事刺激为认知神经科学研究提供了独特的机会，因为它们引发的认知过程很难或不可能用传统范式进行研究。叙事的一个特别引人注目的特征是其时间结构，这使得我们能够对即将发生的事件做出有意义的预测。当我们阅读一个叙事时，我们可以对未来保持一系列复杂的短期和长期猜测，并随着故事的展开不断完善我们的预测。使用叙事的实验可以让研究人员探究在感知过程中记忆系统被灵活运用的方式，包括将连续的经历分割成离散事件的机制。尽管在实验研究中使用叙事和其他自然主义刺激存在挑战，但这些方法为了解现实世界认知的关键组成部分提供了一个新窗口。
