ArticleeLife2025
Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Gaze behavior during closed-captioned movie viewing adapts to absent audio through more frequent switching between text and scene.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Inter-subject correlations and their behavioral associations vary across movies: Implications for generalizability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Movie Features Are Hierarchically Encoded in the Dynamics of Functional Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Emotion regulation success involves systematic gradient-based reconfigurations of large-scale activation patterns in the human brain.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Individual differences in alexithymia modulate cognition-emotion interactions in daily life ongoing experiences.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Mapping content and dynamics in the stream of consciousness through latent brain state analysis.iScience · 2025Article
- Distinct distributed brain networks dissociate self-generated mental states.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Stimulus Selection Influences Prediction of Individual Phenotypes in Naturalistic Conditions.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Individual differences in wellbeing are supported by separable sets of co-active self- and visual-attention-related brain networks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Self-reports map the landscape of task states derived from brain imaging.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Extending insights from LeDoux: using movies to study subjective, clinically meaningful experiences in neuroscience.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Patterns of ongoing thought in the real world and their links to mental health and well-being.PLOS mental health · 2025Article
- The morphospace of the brain-cognition organisation.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
23 authors.
Funding
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 views of ongoing thought argue that the ability to make sense of events in the 'here and now' depend on the neural processing of incoming sensory information by auditory and visual cortex, which are kept in check by systems in association cortex. However, we currently lack an understanding of how patterns of ongoing thoughts map onto the different brain systems 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 occurs at different moments of a film, which does not disrupt the time course of brain activity or the movie-watching experience. We found moments when experience sampling highlighted engagement with multi-sensory features of the film or highlighted thoughts with episodic features, regions of sensory cortex were more active and subsequent memory for events in the movie was better-on the other hand, periods of intrusive distraction emerged when activity in regions of association cortex within the frontoparietal system was reduced. These results highlight the critical role sensory systems play in the multi-modal experience of movie-watching and provide evidence for the role of association cortex in reducing distraction when we watch films.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.