Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching Data and Scripts

Data and scripts for Wallace et al., 2024 for reproducibility can be found here. The study set out to map patterns of thought to brain activity during movie watching. The research experiment was exploratory in nature - so there were no explicit hypotheses. However, we set out to look at whether or not variations in thought patterns during movie watching, consisting of three 11-minute clips from Citizenfour, Little Miss Sunshine, and 500 Days of Summer, by leveraging a novel sampling technique using multi-dimensional experience sampling (mDES). We were able to accomplish this by using previously-collected fMRI data (n = 44) from the naturalistic neuroimaging database (Aliko et al., 2020) where participants were scanned while watching the films, and using a separate sample of participants (n = 120) to come into the lab to watch the same films and respond to mDES probes. Our first analysis consisted of a PCA which decomposed the experience sampling data into 4 components of thought. Based on the mDES item loadings, we labelled the thought patterns 'Episodic Knowledge', 'Intrusive Distraction', 'Verbal Detail', and 'Sensory Engagement.' We found that 'Episodic Knowledge' was most reported during 500 Days of Summer, specifically predicted better comprehension performance for this movie, and was related to activity in the visual cortex, specifically in the dorsal medial regions. 'Intrusive Distraction' was associated with reduced activity in the frontoparietal network, was highly reported during Citizenfour, and predicted poorer overall comprehension performance across the movies. 'Verbal Detail' was associated with reduced activity in the auditory cortex, most reported during Citizenfour. Lastly, "Sensory Engagement" was related to multi-modal sensory engagement in auditory and visual cortexes, predicted better overall comprehension performance, and was most highly reported during 500 Days of Summer. 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. The raw mDES data is available, as well as the full dataset with the PCA components, gradient scores and demographic information. The relevant brain maps from the imaging analyses are also included.