Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching

Abstract

Movie watching is a central aspect of our lives and an important paradigm for understanding the brain mechanisms behind cognition as it occurs in daily life. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience has made important strides in understanding how brain activity emerges during movies and determining how the dynamics of brain regions during movies can be mapped across individuals. However, we currently lack an understanding of how patterns of ongoing thoughts map onto the brain signals that occur when we watch a film, partly because methods of sampling experience disrupt the dynamics of brain activity and the experience of movie watching. Our study established a novel method for mapping thought patterns onto the brain activity that occur at different moments of a film, which does not disrupt the time course of brain activity or the movie-watching experience. We found that in moments when experience sampling highlighted engagement with multi-sensory features of the film, or highlighted thought with episodic features, regions of sensory cortex were more active and subsequent memory for events in the movie is better. These results highlight the critical role that sensory systems play in the multi-modal experience of movie-watching and place important constraints on the contribution of systems in association cortex, like the default network.Significance statementNaturalistic states like movie-watching provide an important window into the brain mechanisms behind cognition in daily life. However, we know relatively little about the mapping between brain activity during movies and associated thought patterns because of difficulties in measuring cognition without disrupting how brain activity naturally unfolds. We establish a novel method to link different experiential states to brain activity during movie-watching with minimal interruptions to viewers or disruptions to brain dynamics. We found patterns indicative of engaged movie-watching occur when visual and auditory cortex are active and predict better memory for information from the films. Our study, therefore, establishes multi-modal brain activity within sensory systems as an integral feature of the movie-watching experience.