Summary: When people watch the same story unfold in real time, their moment-to-moment sense of engagement tends to align. That alignment is driven largely by the emotional content of the narrative, and it is reflected in synchronized brain activity measured with fMRI. These shared patterns of attention also predict which events are better remembered.
Source: University of Chicago
Think about a recent TV episode you watched. You probably remember a few standout scenes more clearly than others—moments that grab attention and stick in your memory. New research from the University of Chicago shows that those attention-grabbing moments tend to be the same for most viewers, and that shared attention corresponds with similar brain activity.
Doctoral student Hayoung Song and Assistant Professor Monica Rosenberg, together with Emily Finn of Dartmouth College, set out to study how people naturally engage with stories and how those fluctuations in engagement affect memory. Rather than using tightly controlled lab tasks, they used naturalistic experiences—watching a TV episode or listening to an audio story—to capture attention as it arises during realistic narrative flow.
Participants continuously rated their own engagement while they watched an episode of the TV show “Sherlock” or listened to an audio-narrated tale. Those subjective engagement ratings were then compared to fMRI data collected from separate groups who watched or listened to the same stories while their brain activity was recorded.
The behavioral results showed a strong convergence: people’s self-reported engagement tended to synchronize across viewers and listeners, peaking at the same narrative moments. Emotional content largely drove those peaks—suspenseful or emotionally charged scenes drew consistent attention from most participants.
Neuroimaging data mirrored the self-reports. During highly engaging moments of the stories, participants’ brain activity became more similar across individuals: the same regions showed increased activation and connectivity. In particular, activity within the default mode network became more synchronized during moments rated as highly engaging.
“When two people watch the same movie, their brains can become similar as if synchronized,” Song said. “This synchrony intensifies at emotionally engaging moments, reflecting shared attentional fluctuations as people process narratives.”
After experience of the narratives, participants completed free recall tasks, describing the events they remembered. The researchers found that the events most frequently recalled were those that coincided with high engagement and with neural signatures of synchronized attention. In other words, the same brain patterns that tracked engagement also predicted which scenes people would remember best.
Song emphasized that the synchrony is dynamic. Brain alignment rose during emotionally charged or suspenseful moments—for example, in “Sherlock,” when the detective examines a murder victim for clues—and fell during less engaging, expository stretches. This drop in synchrony likely reflects different patterns of mind wandering: when attention lapses, people drift in distinct directions, producing more variable brain activity across individuals.
The research team noted that lapses in synchrony most commonly occurred during expositional segments where background information is supplied but plot momentum is low. Song suggested that attention naturally oscillates, and that narratives likely work best when they balance peaks of emotional arousal with quieter moments that allow for processing and rhythm.
Beyond fMRI, the researchers see opportunities to combine behavioral ratings with physiological measures such as pupil dilation and heart rate to build richer models of engagement. Their models based on time-varying functional connectivity were able to predict evolving engagement states across participants and even across independent datasets, and they overlapped with known neuromarkers of sustained attention.
Ongoing work in the Rosenberg lab is extending this approach across a wider range of scenarios—from tasks that demand focused attention to viewing comedic or documentary content—to better understand how attention and memory operate in everyday contexts. The long-term aim is to clarify the neural basis of attentional engagement and its consequences for how events are encoded into memory.
About this attention, emotion and memory research news
Author: Max Witynski
Source: University of Chicago
Contact: Max Witynski – University of Chicago
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access. “Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory” by Hayoung Song, Emily S. Finn, Monica D. Rosenberg. PNAS
Abstract
Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory
As we comprehend narratives, our attentional engagement fluctuates over time. Although theories propose that narrative engagement is closely tied to emotion, there has been limited empirical work characterizing the cognitive and neural processes underlying subjective engagement in naturalistic contexts and how those processes affect memory.
This study links moment-to-moment engagement with patterns of brain coactivation and tests whether neural signatures of engagement predict later memory. In behavioral experiments, participants continuously rated their engagement while watching a television episode or listening to a story. Self-reported engagement synchronized across individuals and was strongly influenced by emotional content.
In fMRI datasets collected from different participants exposed to the same stories, moments of high engagement produced greater neural synchrony: the default mode network showed increased similarity in activity across individuals. Time-varying functional connectivity models predicted changing engagement states across participants and independent datasets. The connections that tracked engagement overlapped with a validated neuromarker of sustained attention and were predictive of recall for narrative events.
Together, these findings identify neural signatures of attentional engagement in naturalistic settings and clarify relationships among narrative engagement, sustained attention, and event memory.