Fig. 3.

Comparison of stories prompted by different music excerpts at different geographic locations. For each of the 32 excerpts, we calculated the pairwise cosine similarities between the TF-IDF vectors for narrative documents collected at each geographic location. We excluded same-excerpt comparisons and instead examined different-excerpt similarity based on the music tradition an excerpt belongs to. The nine box-and-whisker plots depict the median value and quantiles of the distribution of different-excerpt similarity values in each comparison between geographic locations. Individual data points (diamonds) correspond to document similarity values that exceed 1.5× the IQR. For each location comparison, we used Welch’s t test to compare the different-excerpt similarity distributions within and between music traditions. Black lines spanning two distributions at the top of the figure represent significant t tests relative to the permuted difference thresholds. The long solid and dotted lines depict the 95th percentile and median value of the control narrative distributions and represent estimates of the maximum and average similarity expected between unprompted stories by US college undergraduates, respectively. The values serve as an additional reference point and not as a threshold for significance.