Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory

Abstract

As we comprehend narratives, our attentional engagement fluctuates over time. Despite theoretical conceptions of narrative engagement as emotion-laden attention, little empirical work has characterized the cognitive and neural processes that comprise subjective engagement in naturalistic contexts or its consequences for memory. Here, we relate fluctuations in narrative engagement to patterns of brain coactivation and test whether neural signatures of engagement predict subsequent memory. In behavioral studies, participants continuously rated how engaged they were as they watched a television episode or listened to a story. Self-reported engagement was synchronized across individuals and driven by the emotional content of the narratives. In functional MRI datasets collected as different individuals watched the same show or listened to the same story, engagement drove neural synchrony, such that default mode network activity was more synchronized across individuals during more engaging moments of the narratives. Furthermore, models based on time-varying functional brain connectivity predicted evolving states of engagement across participants and independent datasets. The functional connections that predicted engagement overlapped with a validated neuromarker of sustained attention and predicted recall of narrative events. Together, our findings characterize the neural signatures of attentional engagement in naturalistic contexts and elucidate relationships among narrative engagement, sustained attention, and event memory.

EEG theta and N400 responses to congruent versus incongruent brand logos

“…Next, to generate the null distribution, the TFs of the two conditions were scrambled 1000 times, and the difference between the two conditions was calculated for each iteration. Finally, the observed difference was compared to the generated null distribution in order to calculate the p-value for each pixel of TF difference 55 . Then, the pixels that had a p-value lower than 0.01 were considered to show a significant difference between the two conditions.…”

A generalized cortical activity pattern at internally-generated mental context boundaries during unguided narrative recall

“…We correlated 1) the mean between-movie boundary pattern during recall and 2) the mean within-movie event boundary pattern during encoding, in PMC (Figure 4, 'Event offset' condition). Surprisingly, the two were negatively correlated (t(14) = 5.10, p < .001, Cohen's d z = 1.32), suggesting that the between-movie boundary pattern may reflect a cognitive state qualitatively different from the state elicited by event boundaries during movie watching (e.g., attentional engagement; Song et al, 2021).…”

Neural activity during story listening is synchronized across individuals despite acoustic masking

“…Future studies may consider combining our paradigm with a continuous measure of engagement (cf. Song et al, 2021).…”

“…Naturalistic materials such as movies or spoken stories lead to synchronized patterns of neural activity across individuals that scale with the degree of engagement (Hasson et al, 2010;Nastase et al, 2019;Nguyen et al, 2019;Yeshurun et al, 2017). The strength of synchrony across individuals, quantified as inter-subject correlation (ISC; Hasson et al, 2004Dmochowski et al, 2012Dmochowski et al, , 2014, is stronger when stimuli are captivating or exciting (Hasson et al, 2010;Schmälzle et al, 2015), and is predictive of behavioral measures reflecting engagement (Cohen et al, 2017;Dikker et al, 2017;Dmochowski et al, 2014;Poulsen et al, 2017;Song et al, 2021) and recall of the materials (Chan et al, 2019;Cohen et al, 2018;Cohen & Parra, 2016;Davidesco et al, 2019;Hasson, Furman, et al, 2008;Piazza et al, 2021;Song et al, 2021;Stephens et al, 2010). Conversely, ISC is reduced when individuals do not attend to naturalistic materials (Cohen et al, 2018;Ki et al, 2016;Kuhlen et al, 2012;Rosenkranz et al, 2021) or when stimuli are unstructured or temporally scrambled (Dmochowski et al, 2012;Hasson, Yang, et al, 2008).…”