The cognitive system applies categorical thinking to facilitate perception of the rich environment around us. In person cognition, research has focused on the roles of gender, race, age or appearance in social categorical thinking. Here we investigated how narrative roles, as portrayed by different cinematic characters, are categorized in the neurocognitive system. Under functional MRI, 17 human participants (7 females) were asked to make different judgements regarding personality traits of 16 renowned cinematic characters representing four roles: hero, sidekick, mentor and villain. Classification analysis showed a brain network, comprising the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus and the temporoparietal junction bilaterally and the left occipital face area (OFA), to discriminate between the four roles. No such classification was found between other individual attributes including age or the associated film. Moreover, regions overlapping the default mode network (DMN) were found to better discriminate between roles, rather than the individual characters, while the OFA was found to better discriminate between individuals. These results demonstrate the inherent role of roles in person cognition, and suggest an intimate relation between roles categorization and self-referential activity.
