Simultaneously Uncovering the Patterns of Brain Regions Involved in Different Story Reading Subprocesses

Story understanding involves many perceptual and cognitive subprocesses, from perceiving individual words, to parsing sentences, to understanding the relationships among the story characters. In this study, researchers constructed the first integrated computational model of reading, identifying which parts of the brain are active when breaking down sentences, determining the meaning of a text and understanding the relationships between words. Researchers used a functional MRI to document what happened in the brains of participants while they read a chapter from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This approach is promising for studying individual differences: it can be used to create single subject maps that may potentially be used to measure reading comprehension and diagnose reading disorders.