Title

'Towards a Characterization of Narrative Cognition: EEG metrics for continuous trajectories'

Introduction

Identification of the brain's response to various narratives and understanding the way the brain engages with narratives would lead to a better understanding of the human decision-making processes and help us to create more engaging narratives. The cognitive processes involved when humans are exposed to narratives have not been thoroughly explored using EEG metrics.

In this Ph.D. project, we first developed a framework in which the participants could experience a real-life continuous narrative. This framework would help us bridge the gap between high-level narrative concepts and low-level EEG metrics. Moreover, this Ph.D. project is the first effort to characterize different phases of the narrative dramatic arc independently.

In the second phase, we developed metrics inspired by other fields that enabled us to explore the cognitive processes behind continuous narratives. These metrics consist of dynamic inter-subject correlation (dISC), dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), and graph theoretical features.

The potential applications of this work could be used to develop new methods for evaluating the effectiveness of educational materials or to improve the design of interactive media.

Assessment Committee

• Associate professor Georgios Triantafyllidis (chair), Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Copenhagen Campus.
• Professor Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting, Neuroscience Research Group, Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany
• Professor Paolo Massimo Buscema, SEMEION Research Center, Rome, Italy

Supervisor

• Associate professor Luis Emilio Bruni, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Copenhagen Campus.

The supervisor is a committee member in a non-voting capacity.

A reception will be arranged afterwards. The PhD thesis as a download, can be obtained from Hossein Dini by sending an email to hdi@create.aau.dk.