Brains in Synchrony: A study of social cognition and Despicable Me?
Photo by Aneta Pawlik on Unsplash
You are sitting in a dimly lit grand theater, gazing up in awe at the magnificent architecture displayed on the projector screen when suddenly a car explodes in the left-bottom corner and a chase ensues. You jolt backwards and hear screams from your fellow movie-watchers. As the chase comes to a halt, you hear a collective gasp of relief.
Movies are a well-loved form of entertainment that many people enjoy in their day-to-day lives, w. Whether it is watching an intense action movie, a freaky horror fiasco, or a family-oriented cartoon, like “Despicable Me.” Although entirely mundane, movie watching involves high-level processes. Movie-watchers need to integrate sights and sounds that they perceive, while following the plot, remembering intricate details, and predicting characters’ next moves. Movie watching is also a shared experience. The collective gasps heard in the theater are a sign of synchrony to both the movie and neighbouring movie-watchers.
Dr. Kathleen Lyons, PhD, and her colleagues at The University of Western Ontario were interested in understanding the mental processes involved when children share an understanding of a movie. They used MRI scans to study how brains of children synchronize to each other using neural synchrony, or how similarly activated brain regions of two individuals are when participating in a shared task. Previous research showed that when people have a similar interpretation of a movie, neural synchrony in brain regions associated with social processing was greater. This led Dr. Lyons to suspect that differences in social processing may lead to differences in neural synchrony while watching a movie with social themes.
To study differences in social processing, Dr. Lyons looked at the brains of autistic and non-autistic children. Autistic children tend to struggle with social cognition, face perception, and Theory of Mind – a term that refers to the capacity to understand what another person may be thinking or doing. The children watched the popular family movie “Despicable Me” while their brains were being imaged in an MRI scanner, capturing activated brain regions and networks. The researchers then calculated neural synchrony for each participant by studying the brain regions and networks activated in one participant compared with all other participants in their group. The researchers focused on networks of brain regions involved in social cognition via the Theory of Mind network, emotional processing via the limbic network, and plot following via the frontoparietal network.
How closely do brains synchronize in autistic and non-autistic children while watching a movie?
The researchers found that across all participants there was high neural synchrony in the auditory and visual areas of the brain while watching the movie. Since movies contain rich auditory and visual information, a finding like this confirms that all children participated in the movie watching task. Dr. Lyons then compared whole brain synchrony between groups and found that autistic children had less overall synchrony while watching the movie compared to non-autistic children. Diving deeper, the researchers honed in on the brain networks involved in social processing, emotional processing, and plot following. The Theory of Mind network and the limbic network seemed to show a similar picture, where autistic children showed less synchrony than those without autism. However, the results did not capture a difference in synchrony in the frontoparietal network. Taking together these results, the researchers believe that autistic children may be processing the social and emotional themes of the movie differently.
While interrogating the data, the researchers noticed that a quarter of the autistic children showed high neural synchrony with a group of non-autistic children in the Theory of Mind network. This suggests some similarities in movie processing. Additionally, some non-autistic children showed low neural synchrony with every other participant. Overall, this suggests that there are likely lots of different ways in which autistic and non-autistic children process movies and highlights the importance of characterizing individual differences. These results shed light on how autistic and non-autistic children consciously experience this world.
The future of social cognition research
Although this research shows that differences in brain activity exist while watching a movie for children that differ in their social abilities, it is not fully clear how participants truly differed in their interpretations of the movie. Dr. Lyons believes that “other types of cognitive processes may influence how children process movies,” as she continues to study this area of research. Currently, Dr. Lyons is interested in a new brain imaging technique called hyperscanning, where multiple participants can have their brain activity measured simultaneously. She believes that this method may be able to tease apart differences in how children process dynamic real-world social experiences.
Article:
Lyons, K. M., Stevenson, R. A., Owen, A. M., & Stojanoski, B. (2020). Examining the relationship between measures of autistic traits and neural synchrony during movies in children with and without autism. NeuroImage: Clinical, 28, 102477. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2020.102477