"Shall I compare thee": The neural basis of literary awareness, and its benefits to cognition

Exploring the different cognitive, emotional and imaginative experiences of autistic and non-autistic adult readers when contemplating serious literature as compared to non-fiction

Introduction

Recent research has demonstrated how reflections on serious literature can challenge dominant social-deficit views of autism. This method enables autistic readers to explore social realities more slowly and carefully, encouraging detail-focused considerations. Previous research has also shown that autistic and non-autistic readers reflecting on serious literature together are able to achieve mutuality in a way that enables them to overcome the double empathy problem. However, the advantages of reading aloud designs have yet to be explored with autistic and non-autistic readers due to previous concerns amongst autistic people on the issue of being read aloud to. The present study aimed to explore how an adapted shared reading design that compared serious literature and non-fiction would enable autistic and non-autistic readers to imaginatively engage in the reading experience.

Methods

Seven autistic and six non-autistic participants read 8 short text extracts alone while listening to pre-recorded audio of an experienced reader reading each text aloud. Participants completed a reflective questionnaire for each text and a follow-up interview where moving parts of the text were then re-read aloud before discussion. Half of these texts were serious literature, while the other half were non-fiction. Similarly, half of the texts explored fictional social realities that depicted a lack of mutuality, or non-fiction accounts of autism; while the other half explored broader emotional experiences.

Results

Thematic and literary analysis of participant reflections and follow-up interviews revealed three main themes: (1) From Surface Reading to Intuitive Engagement, (2) Imaginative Feeling and (3) Going Forward from the Reading Experience.

Discussion

The findings showed that autistic readers were better able to hold onto the detailed complexity of serious literature, while non-autistic readers tended to reduce information down to key ideas and understandings for later generalization. Findings are discussed in relation to future shared reading designs.

'Looking before and after': Can simple eye tracking patterns distinguish poetic from prosaic texts?

Introduction

The study of 'serious' literature has recently developed into an emerging field called neurocognitive poetics that applies cognitive neuroscientific techniques to examine how we understand and appreciate poetry. The current research used eye-tracking techniques on a small sample of young adults to see if and how the reading of short pieces of poetry differed from the reading of matched prosaic texts.

Methods

With 'proof of concept' intentions reflecting arguments first proposed by 19th Century literary figures, there was a particular focus on the differences between the reading of poetry and prose in terms number and frequency of fixations and regressive eye movements back and forth within the texts in this two-by-two experimental design (poetry vs. prose x need vs. no need for final line reappraisal).

Results

It was found that poetic pieces compared to prosaic pieces were associated with more and longer fixations and more regressive eye movements throughout the text. The need to reappraise meaning at the prompt of a final line was only significantly associated with more regressive eye movements. Comparisons examining the 4 text conditions (poetic reappraisal, poetic non-reappraisal, prosaic reappraisal, and prosaic non-reappraisal) showed that the poetic reappraisal condition was characterised by significantly more regressive eye movements as well as longer fixations compared to the prosaic non-reappraisal condition. No significant correlations were found between self-reported literary familiarity and eye tracking patterns.

Discussion

Despite limitations, this proof-of-concept study provides insights into reading patterns that can help to define objectively the nature of poetic material as requiring slower reading particularly characterised by more and longer fixations and eye movements backwards through the texts compared to the faster, more linear reading of prose. Future research using these, and other psychophysiological metrics can begin to unpack the putative cognitive benefits of reading literary material.

Challenging Empathic Deficit Models of Autism Through Responses to Serious Literature

Dominant theoretical models of autism and resultant research enquiries have long centered upon an assumed autism-specific empathy deficit. Associated empirical research has largely relied upon cognitive tests that lack ecological validity and associate empathic skill with heuristic-based judgments from limited snapshots of social information. This artificial separation of thought and feeling fails to replicate the complexity of real-world empathy, and places socially tentative individuals at a relative disadvantage. The present study aimed to qualitatively explore how serious literary fiction, through its ability to simulate real-world empathic response, could therefore enable more ecologically valid insights into the comparative empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. Eight autistic and seven non-autistic participants read Of Mice and Men for six days while completing a semi-structured reflective diary. On finishing the book, participants were asked to engage in three creative writing tasks that encouraged reflective thinking across the novel. Thematic and literary analysis of the diary reflections and writing tasks revealed three main themes (1) Distance from the Novel; (2) Mobility of Response; (3) Re-Creating Literature. Findings demonstrated the usefulness of serious literature as a research tool for comparing the empathic experiences of autistic and non-autistic individuals. Specifically, autistic individuals often showed enhanced socio-empathic understandings of the literature with no empathy deficits when compared to non-autistic participants.

Overcoming the Double Empathy Problem Within Pairs of Autistic and Non-autistic Adults Through the Contemplation of Serious Literature

Recent research based on the needs of the autistic community has explored the frequent social misunderstandings that arise between autistic and non-autistic people, known as the double empathy problem. Double empathy understandings require both groups to respect neurodiversity by focussing on individuality across groups. This study aimed to explore how literature, through its ability to uncover nuanced emotional response differences between readers, could facilitate double empathy understandings within pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A longitudinal, qualitative design was used, with 4 gender-matched pairs. Participants read Of Mice and Men for 1 week, whilst completing a structured, reflective diary. This was followed by 4 one-hour paired reading sessions, where pairs discussed the book and their reflections in depth. Participants were then invited to a final one-on-one interview to discuss their thoughts and experiences of the paired reading sessions. Thematic and literary analysis of the session and interview data revealed four themes (1) The Book as Social Oil; (2) From a World of Difference to a World of Affinity; (3) Emotional Intelligence: From Thinking About to Feeling with; and (4) From Overwhelming to Overcoming. All participants reported having achieved an individualised view of one another to explore their nuanced differences. The non-autistic group reported a more sensitive understanding of what it means to be autistic, while the autistic group overcame concerns about non-autistic people stereotyping autism, and instead reported feeling valued and accommodated by their non-autistic partners.

Neuroimaging of valence decisions in children and adults

To date, the neural underpinnings of affective components in language processing in children remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, the present study examined behavioural and neural correlates of children and adults performing the same auditory valence decision task with an event-related fMRI paradigm. Based on previous findings in adults, activations in anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus were expected for both positive and negative valence categories. Recent behavioural findings on valence decisions showed similar ratings and reaction time patterns in children and adults. This finding was successfully replicated in the present study. On a neural level, our analysis of affective language processing showed activations in regions associated with both semantic (superior and middle temporal and frontal) and affective (anterior and posterior cingulate, orbitofrontal and inferior frontal, insula and amygdala) processing. Neural activations in children and adults were systematically different in explicit affective word processing. In particular, adults showed a more distributed semantic network activation while children recruited additional subcortical structures.

Cognitive flexibility and parental education differentially predict implicit and explicit racial biases in bilingual children

Prior research has suggested that bilingual children demonstrate reduced social bias relative to their monolingual peers. In particular, they exhibit less implicit bias against racial outgroups. However, the cognitive determinants of racial bias in bilingual children remain unclear. In the current study, relationships between racial bias and three cognitive factors (inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, and perspective-taking ability), along with language proficiency and parental education, were investigated in a sample of bilingual preschoolers (N = 55). Children were bilingual learners of English and Mandarin. Results demonstrated that implicit bias was predicted by cognitive flexibility, independent of variation in inhibitory control, second language vocabulary, perspective taking, and parental education. In contrast, explicit bias was predicted by parental education alone and not by cognitive or linguistic factors. Findings suggest that increased cognitive flexibility, often thought to be an outgrowth of bilingual experience, may also be associated with a reduction in implicit bias. Findings are discussed in terms of specific mechanisms that may link cognitive factors, bilingualism, and racial bias.

Uncovering cortical activations of discourse comprehension and their overlaps with common large-scale neural networks

We conducted a meta-analysis of 78 task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies (1976 total participants) to reveal underlying brain activations and their overlap with large-scale neural networks in the brain during general discourse comprehension and its sub-processes. We found that discourse comprehension involved a neural system consisting of widely distributed brain regions that comprised not only the bilateral perisylvian language zones, but also regions in the superior and medial frontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe. Moreover, this neural system can be categorized into several sub-systems representing various sub-processes of discourse comprehension, with the left inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus serving as core regions across all sub-processes. At a large-scale network level, we found that discourse comprehension relied most heavily on the default network, particularly on its dorsal medial subsystem. The pattern associated with large-scale network cooperation varied according to the respective sub-processes required. Our results reveal the functional dissociation within the discourse comprehension neural system and highlight the flexible involvements of large-scale networks.

The Experience of Beauty of Chinese Poetry and Its Neural Substrates

Chinese poetry has a long history and high esthetic value. People who engage esthetically with Chinese poetry would feel the sense of beauty naturally. However, there is little information regarding what happens in the brain when an individual appreciates Chinese poetry, and how the brain processes the subject’s appreciation of beauty. Herein, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates of experiencing beauty by appreciating Chinese poetry. The participants in our study were 28 college students and the stimuli consisted of 25 Chinese poetry and 25 prose selections. Based on an event-related paradigm, the findings of this study suggested that different areas scattered in both the left and right cerebral hemispheres are activated when an individual appreciates Chinese poetry. Compared to reading prose, appreciating Chinese poetry heightens the activation of the left inferior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the bilateral insula, the left fusiform, the left supplementary motor area (SMA), and the left precentral gyrus. In these areas, the left inferior OFC and the bilateral insula are considered closely related to experiencing beauty of Chinese poetry, which have been demonstrated that it is an important neural basis of esthetic beauty when using other types of materials. The findings of this study shed new light on the complex but ordinary processes of experiencing beauty when appreciating Chinese poetry and show that some key processes underlying the feeling of esthetic beauty are shared across different esthetic domains.

The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature

Fiction is vital to our being. Many people enjoy engaging with fiction every day. Here we focus on literary reading as 1 instance of fiction consumption from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. The brain processes which play a role in the mental construction of fiction worlds and the related engagement with fictional characters, remain largely unknown. The authors discuss the neurocognitive poetics model ( Jacobs, 2015a ) of literary reading specifying the likely neuronal correlates of several key processes in literary reading, namely inference and situation model building, immersion, mental simulation and imagery, figurative language and style, and the issue of distinguishing fact from fiction. An overview of recent work on these key processes is followed by a discussion of methodological challenges in studying the brain bases of fiction processing.

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.

A comparative study of cognitive behavioural therapy and shared reading for chronic pain

The case for psychosocial interventions in relation to chronic pain, one of the most common health issues in contemporary healthcare, is well-established as a means of managing the emotional and psychological difficulties experienced by sufferers. Using mixed methods, this study compared a standard therapy for chronic pain, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a specific literature-based intervention, shared reading (SR) developed by national charity, The Reader. A 5-week CBT group and a 22-week SR group for patients with chronic pain ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT. In addition to self-report measures of positive and negative affect before and after each experience of the intervention, the 10 participants kept twice-daily (12-hourly) pain and emotion diaries. Qualitative data were gathered via literary-linguistic analysis of audio/video-recordings and transcriptions of the CBT and SR sessions and video-assisted individual qualitative interviews with participants. Qualitative evidence indicates SR's potential as an alternative or long-term follow-up or adjunct to CBT in bringing into conscious awareness areas of emotional pain otherwise passively suffered by patients with chronic pain. In addition, quantitative analysis, albeit of limited pilot data, indicated possible improvements in mood/pain for up to 2 days following SR. Both findings lay the basis for future research involving a larger sample size.

Murder by the book: using crime fiction as a bibliotherapeutic resource

Crime is a popular genre of fiction, widely read but sometimes seen as 'throwaway'. Disregarding this type of fiction because it is seen as low quality does not take into account its value to readers. Reading has been established as a means of improving mental health and well-being-often known as bibliotherapy. This often focuses on fiction considered to have literary merit rather than genre fiction like crime. However, in framing therapeutic reading in this way, the impact of texts considered to have low cultural value such as crime has been concealed. Examining readers' responses as a starting point identifies some reasons why crime fiction fulfils a need. Readers in an empirical study spoke about the strong narrative as a distraction, the predictability as a comfort and the safe distance from events as a reassurance that left them feeling that reading crime fiction was a refuge from the world. In exploring readers' responses in relation to the academic literature, the paper argues that there is a need to think differently about how readers engage with texts and how they experience reading as therapeutic, with a role for fiction like crime.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust.