Social perspective-taking shapes brain hemodynamic activity and eye movements during movie viewing

The paradoxical brain: paradoxes impact conflict perspectives through increased neural alignment

Mental perspectives can sometimes be changed by psychological interventions. For instance, when applied in the context of intergroup conflicts, interventions, such as the paradoxical thinking intervention, may unfreeze ingrained negative outgroup attitudes and thereby promote progress toward peacemaking. Yet, at present, the evaluation of interventions' impact relies almost exclusively on self-reported and behavioral measures that are informative, but are also prone to social desirability and self-presentational biases. In the present study, magnetoencephalography tracked neural alignment, before and after the paradoxical thinking intervention, during the processing of auditory narratives over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and thereby evaluated the intervention's potential to change individuals' (n = 80) mental perspectives over the conflict. Compared to baseline, the conflict-targeted intervention yielded a specific significant increased neural alignment in the posterior superior temporal sulcus while processing incongruent as well as congruent political narratives of the conflict. This may be interpreted as a possible change in perspective over the conflict. The results and their interpretations are discussed in view of the critical added value of neuroimaging when assessing interventions to potentially reveal changes in mental perspectives or the way in which they are processed, even in contexts of entrenched resistance to reconsider one's ideological stance.

Sisterhood predicts similar neural processing of a film

Relationships between humans are essential for how we see the world. Using fMRI, we explored the neural basis of homophily, a sociological concept that describes the tendency to bond with similar others. Our comparison of brain activity between sisters, friends and acquaintances while they watched a movie, indicate that sisters' brain activity is more similar than that of friends and friends' activity is more similar than that of acquaintances. The increased similarity in brain activity measured as inter-subject correlation (ISC) was found both in higher-order brain areas including the default-mode network (DMN) and sensory areas. Increased ISC could not be explained by genetic relation between sisters neither by similarities in eye-movements, emotional experiences, and physiological activity. Our findings shed light on the neural basis of homophily by revealing that similarity in brain activity in the DMN and sensory areas is the stronger the closer is the relationship between the people.

Perspective taking in the human brain: complementary evidence from neuroimaging studies with media-based naturalistic stimuli and artificial controlled paradigms

Perception and interpretation of various types of events and information in life crucially depend on one's perspective. A specific perspective can be explicitly adopted, for example, via instructing an experimental subject, implicitly via a priori information given to subjects, and by subjects' personality traits or cultural background. The neural basis of perspective taking has been addressed in a number of recent neuroimaging studies, some of which have used movies and narratives as media-based stimuli to pursue a holistic understanding of the phenomenon under ecologically valid conditions. Results across these studies suggest that the human brain flexibly adapts to support the information-processing needs of different perspectives, however, also that inferior temporal-occipital areas and posterior-medial parietal areas are engaged across different perspectives. These findings are complemented by studies that have investigated specific aspects of perspective taking with highly controlled experimental designs. They have disclosed involvement of the temporoparietal junction in visual perspective taking and the importance of the affective component of the pain matrix when empathizing with others' pain. Identification with the protagonists also seems to matter, as dorsomedial vs. ventromedial prefrontal areas are recruited when the protagonist is dissimilar vs. similar to self. Finally, as a translational aspect, perspective taking can, under certain conditions, serve as an effective emotion regulation technique, wherein lateral and medial regions of the prefrontal cortex seem to support reappraisal processes. Together, findings from studies with media-based stimuli and more traditional paradigms complement each other to gain a comprehensive understanding of the neural basis of perspective taking.

Synchrony in the periphery: inter-subject correlation of physiological responses during live music concerts

While there is an increasing shift in cognitive science to study perception of naturalistic stimuli, this study extends this goal to naturalistic contexts by assessing physiological synchrony across audience members in a concert setting. Cardiorespiratory, skin conductance, and facial muscle responses were measured from participants attending live string quintet performances of full-length works from Viennese Classical, Contemporary, and Romantic styles. The concert was repeated on three consecutive days with different audiences. Using inter-subject correlation (ISC) to identify reliable responses to music, we found that highly correlated responses depicted typical signatures of physiological arousal. By relating physiological ISC to quantitative values of music features, logistic regressions revealed that high physiological synchrony was consistently predicted by faster tempi (which had higher ratings of arousing emotions and engagement), but only in Classical and Romantic styles (rated as familiar) and not the Contemporary style (rated as unfamiliar). Additionally, highly synchronised responses across all three concert audiences occurred during important structural moments in the music-identified using music theoretical analysis-namely at transitional passages, boundaries, and phrase repetitions. Overall, our results show that specific music features induce similar physiological responses across audience members in a concert context, which are linked to arousal, engagement, and familiarity.

Experiencing Happiness Together Facilitates Dyadic Coordination through the Enhanced Interpersonal Neural Synchronization

Experiencing positive emotions together facilitates interpersonal understanding and promotes subsequent social interaction among individuals. However, the neural underpinnings of such emotional-social effect remain to be discovered. Current study employed the fNIRS-based hyperscanning to investigate the above mentioned relationship. After participants in dyad watching movie clips with happily or neutral emotion, they were asked to perform the interpersonal cooperative task, with their neural activation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) being recorded simultaneously via functional near infrared spectroscopy. Results suggested that compared with the neutral movie watching together, a higher interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) in left inferior frontal gyrus during participant dyads watching happiness movie together. Subsequently, dyads in happiness showed more effective coordination interaction during performed the interpersonal cooperation task compared to those in the neutral condition, and such facilitated effect was associated with increased cooperation-related INS at left middle frontal cortex. A mediation analysis showed that the coordination interaction fully mediated the relationship between the emotion-induced INS during the happiness movie-viewing and the cooperation-related INS in interpersonal cooperation. Taken together, our findings suggest that the faciliatory effect experiencing happiness together has on interpersonal cooperation can be reliably reflected by the INS magnitude at the brain level.

Knowledge guides attention to goal-relevant information in older adults

How does viewers’ knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in episodic memory, and when relevant knowledge is lacking, older adults’ memory can suffer. Yet, the mechanism by which prior knowledge guides attentional selection when watching dynamic activity is unclear. To address this, we studied the influence of knowledge on attention and memory for everyday events in young and older adults by tracking their eyes while they watched videos. The videos depicted activities that older adults perform more frequently than young adults (balancing a checkbook, planting flowers) or activities that young adults perform more frequently than older adults (installing a printer, setting up a video game). Participants completed free recall, recognition, and order memory tests after each video. We found age-related memory deficits when older adults had little knowledge of the activities, but memory did not differ between age groups when older adults had relevant knowledge and experience with the activities. Critically, results showed that knowledge influenced where viewers fixated when watching the videos. Older adults fixated less goal-relevant information compared to young adults when watching young adult activities, but they fixated goal-relevant information similarly to young adults, when watching more older adult activities. Finally, results showed that fixating goal-relevant information predicted free recall of the everyday activities for both age groups. Thus, older adults may use relevant knowledge to more effectively infer the goals of actors, which guides their attention to goal-relevant actions, thus improving their episodic memory for everyday activities.

Movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging

Using movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in human neuroimaging studies has yielded significant advances in understanding of cognitive and emotional functions. The relevant literature was reviewed, with emphasis on how the use of naturalistic stimuli has helped advance scientific understanding of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition in ways that would have been difficult otherwise. These advances include discovering a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, which supports processing of dynamic information that accumulates over several time scales, such as immediate reactions vs. slowly emerging patterns in social interactions. Naturalistic stimuli have also helped elucidate how the hippocampus supports segmentation and memorization of events in day-to-day life and have afforded insights into attentional brain mechanisms underlying our ability to adopt specific perspectives during natural viewing. Further, neuroimaging studies with naturalistic stimuli have revealed the role of the default-mode network in narrative-processing and in social cognition. Finally, by robustly eliciting genuine emotions, these stimuli have helped elucidate the brain basis of both basic and social emotions apparently manifested as highly overlapping yet distinguishable patterns of brain activity.

Neural Processing of Narratives: From Individual Processing to Viral Propagation

Narratives, in the form of, e.g., written stories, mouth-to-mouth accounts, audiobooks, fiction movies, and media-feeds, powerfully shape the perception of reality and widely influence human decision-making. In this review, we describe findings from recent neuroimaging studies unraveling how narratives influence the human brain, thus shaping perception, cognition, emotions, and decision-making. It appears that narrative sense-making relies on default-mode network (DMN) structures of the brain, especially precuneus. Activity in precuneus further seems to differ for fictitious vs. real narratives. Notably, high inter-subject correlation (ISC) of brain activity during narrative processing seems to predict the efficacy of a narrative. Factors that enhance the ISC of brain activity during narratives include higher levels of attention, emotional arousal, and negative emotional valence. Higher levels of attentional suspense seem to co-vary with activity in the temporoparietal junction, emotional arousal with activity in dorsal attention network, and negative emotional valence with activity in DMN. Lingering after-effects of emotional narratives have been further described in DMN, amygdala, and sensory cortical areas. Finally, inter-individual differences in personality, and cultural-background related analytical and holistic thinking styles, shape ISC of brain activity during narrative perception. Together, these findings offer promising leads for future studies elucidating the effects of narratives on the human brain, and how such effects might predict the efficacy of narratives in modulating decision-making.