Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition: a media-informed approach to naturalistic neuroscience

Abstract

So-called “naturalistic” stimuli have risen in popularity in cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience over the last 15 years, However, a critical property of these stimuli is frequently overlooked: Media—like film, television, books, and podcasts—are fundamentally not natural. They are deliberately crafted products meant to elicit particular human thought, emotion, and behavior. Here, we argue for a more informed approach to adopting media stimuli in experimental paradigms. We discuss the pitfalls of combining stimuli that are designed for research with those that are designed for other purposes (e.g., entertainment) under the umbrella term of “naturalistic” and present strategies to improve rigor in the stimulus selection process. We assert that experiencing media should be considered a task akin to any other experimental task(s), and explain how this shift in perspective will compel more nuanced and generalizable research using these stimuli. Throughout, we offer theoretical and practical knowledge from multidisciplinary media research to raise the standard for the treatment of media stimuli in neuroscience research.

A natural language fMRI dataset for voxelwise encoding models

“…Natural language can also include multiple modalities, such as vision for written or signed language and audition for spoken language. 8 Our dataset focuses on one specific subset of natural language: spoken English in the form of complete narrative stories from The Moth podcast. This permits detailed study of the auditory speech processing as well as core amodal language systems.…”

Remembering in the wild: recontextualising and reconciling studies of media and memory

“…Choices relating to media must be carefully explained and justified, since they are important to the activity that takes place (Grall and Finn 2022). There are simply no abstract, objective, or archetypal media-memory practices, and media are never representative of everyday experience (Grall and Finn 2022). These challenges reinforce the importance of describing and analysing the role of context.…”

“…Experimental studies seeking effects of one kind of medium, such as photographs, often ignore the influence of other media that are in play, or how multiple media combine in influencing acts of remembering. All media, including word lists, questionnaires, brain scans, etc., inevitably, are non-neutral (Grall and Finn 2022). For example, the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ), a commonly used tool for testing the phenomenological qualities of recall (Johnson et al 1988), not only measures but also influences recall by prompting participants to consider past episodes in multiple ways.…”

Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children

“…Although traditional paradigms allow for rigorous experimental control, they run the risk of stripping out the broader social and motivational features of children’s environments that are critical for their real-life learning and behavior ( Cantlon, 2020 ). For this reason, it may be fruitful to turn to movie fMRI, which can be specifically leveraged to richly engage emotional and social processes of interest, since movies are intentionally designed to evoke certain nuanced responses in their viewers ( Grall and Finn, 2022 , Sonkusare et al, 2019 ). Movie fMRI allows for more dynamic analysis of complex emotional responses ( Gruskin et al, 2020 ), improves prediction of behavior ( Finn and Bandettini, 2021 ), and can be combined with analytical techniques that boost signal-to-noise for individual differences ( Finn et al, 2020 , Simony and Chang, 2019 ).…”