Santacroce Federica, Committeri Giorgia, Di Matteo Rosalia, Di Censo Davide, Sestieri Carlo, Tosoni Annalisa
Department of Psychology (DiPSI), University "G. D'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti-Pescara, Italy.
Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies (ITAB), University "G. D'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti-Pescara, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2025 Oct 3;15(1):34500. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-17427-x.
Research in cognitive science has progressively highlighted the notion of geometric representations (map and graph-like structures) for storing and organizing knowledge in both spatial and non-spatial domains. It's unclear, however, whether these representations aid in organizing knowledge from unconstrained and naturalistic episodic encoding and whether it is possible to identify objective episodic parameters that support the implicit construction of structural-semantic knowledge. Here, we investigated how statistical regularities in a movie narrative contribute to the generalization process underlying social knowledge's gradual construction and organization. Using the narrative of a TV series, participants watched five episodes and then performed a retrieval task in which they rated the strength of social relationships between characters (i.e., social closeness). An objective graph of social closeness, based on parameters extracted from the teleplay, was compared to subjective social graphs derived from participants' judgments. The results revealed a strong correlation between the two graphs and highlighted the importance of physical co-occurrence in shaping social representations. The generalization process was independent of awareness of task demands, suggesting an implicit mechanism. Additionally, increased episodic exposure improved both the inter-subject stability and the coherence of the social graphs, supporting the notion that repeated episodic experiences enhance semantic representations. These findings emphasize the role of episodic statistical regularities as building blocks for the organization of non-spatial, conceptual knowledge in graph-like structures.
认知科学的研究日益凸显了几何表征（地图和类似图的结构）在空间和非空间领域存储和组织知识的概念。然而，尚不清楚这些表征是否有助于组织来自无约束和自然主义情节编码的知识，以及是否有可能识别支持结构语义知识隐性构建的客观情节参数。在此，我们研究了电影叙事中的统计规律如何促进社会知识逐渐构建和组织背后的泛化过程。利用一部电视剧的叙事，参与者观看了五集，然后执行一项检索任务，在该任务中他们对角色之间社会关系的强度（即社会亲密度）进行评分。基于从电视剧剧本中提取的参数构建的社会亲密度客观图，与从参与者判断中得出的主观社会图进行了比较。结果显示这两个图之间存在很强的相关性，并突出了身体共现对塑造社会表征的重要性。泛化过程独立于对任务要求的意识，表明存在一种隐性机制。此外，增加情节曝光改善了社会图的主体间稳定性和连贯性，支持了重复情节体验会增强语义表征这一观点。这些发现强调了情节统计规律作为在类似图的结构中组织非空间概念知识的基石的作用。
