The reward system plays a role in natural story comprehension

Abstract

Prediction is a fundamental process that spans most facets of human cognition and is one of the most essential aspects of efficient language processing. At the same time, prediction plays a critical role in reward processing. Nevertheless, the exploration of the involvement of the reward system during language processing has not yet been directly tested. Here, we investigated the role of reward-processing regions while listening to a natural story. In a pre-registered study, we utilized a published dataset in which half of the participants listened to a natural story and the others listened to a scrambled version of it. We compared the functional MRI signals in the reward system between these conditions and discovered a unique pattern that differentiates between them. This suggests that the reward system is activated during the comprehension of natural stories. We also found that the fMRI signals in reward areas are related to the predictability level of processed sentences and that the system might be involved in higher predictability during the processing of a natural story.