Time, space and emotion: fMRI reveals content-specific activation during text comprehension

Story comprehension involves building a situation model of the text, i.e., a representation containing information on the who, where, when and why of the story. Using fMRI at 3T, domain-specific activations for three different information aspects were sought. Twenty participants read two sentence stories half of which contained inconsistencies concerning emotional, temporal or spatial information. Partly replicating previous results [E.C. Ferstl, M. Rinck, D.Y. von Cramon, Emotional and temporal aspects of situation model processing during text comprehension: an event-related fMRI study, J. Cogn. Neurosci. 17 (2005) 724–739], the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex/orbito-frontal cortex proved important for processing temporal information. The left anterior temporal lobe was particularly important during emotional stories. Most importantly, spatial information elicited bilateral activation in the collateral sulci and the posterior cingulate cortex, areas important for visuo-spatial cognition. These findings provide further evidence for content-specific processes during text comprehension.