Readers of novels are said to end up better at reading people, a claim readers enjoy and skeptics distrust. Reading and social cognition do both recruit the , which is the kind of overlap that could explain it. A shared network is a mechanism worth testing rather than a finding on its own.
The same subnetwork does both jobs. Passages with social and abstract content preferentially engaged the subnetwork, while vivid passages engaged the subnetwork instead. Participants who read fiction most often showed the strongest social cognition, and mediation analysis put the dorsomedial response in the middle of that relation.
Research in psychology has suggested that reading fiction can improve individuals’ social-cognitive abilities. Findings from neuroscience show that reading and social cognition both recruit the default network, which is known to support the capacity to simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces and mental states.
The hypothesis is specific. Fiction reading may enhance social cognition because it serves to exercise the default subnetwork involved in , rather than because of anything general about reading.
While undergoing functional neuroimaging, participants read literary passages that differed along two dimensions: vivid against abstract, and social against non-social. Crossing those dimensions is what allows one subnetwork to be distinguished from another.
The analyses separate them cleanly. The medial temporal lobe subnetwork responded preferentially to vivid passages, with or without social content, while the dorsomedial prefrontal subnetwork responded preferentially to social and abstract passages. Participants who read fiction most often also showed the strongest social cognition, and mediation analysis showed that dorsomedial activity to social content mediated that relation.
wat. The part of the brain that models other minds is the part fiction exercises.
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It moves the claim from a correlation about readers to a specific piece of cortex doing a specific kind of work.
How do we know?
Tamir and colleagues scanned participants while they read literary passages varying along two dimensions, vivid against abstract and social against non-social, then related reading habits to social cognition performance.
What is still unknown
Mediation analysis on cross-sectional data cannot show that reading came first.
Learn something?
Where to next
Can a few minutes with a text change how well you read another person?literature
Does reading literary fiction make us more empathic?literature
Does a spoiler really make a story more enjoyable?literature