Examining the Relationships Between Socio-cognitive Factors and Neural Synchrony During Movie Watching Across Development
Abstract
While different cognitive abilities mature, the conscious experiences of children likely become richer and more elaborate. A challenge in investigating relationships between cognitive development and real-world experiences is having measures that assess naturalistic processing. Movie watching offers a solution, since following the plot of a film requires cognitive processes that are similar to real-world experiences. When different adults watch the same film, their brain activity begins to align (known as neural synchrony). The strength of this alignment has been shown to reflect the degree to which different individuals are having a similar experience of the movie. While this phenomenon has been established in adults, much less is known about the neural mechanisms supporting naturalistic processing in children and adolescents. The current thesis investigated the neural correlates of movie watching across late childhood and early adolescence. In Chapter 2, I found that autistic children showed more variable brain responses in regions associated with social cognition when watching a movie compared to children without autism. In Chapter 3, I found that adolescents (ages 11-15) with higher cognitive scores showed greater neural synchrony during movie watching in brain regions associated with social processing and executive functions compared to those with below average cognitive scores. This pattern was not evident in children (ages 7-11) who differed in their cognitive scores. In Chapter 4, I found that although the spatial topographies of children’s functional brain networks were nearly indistinguishable during movie watching and rest, these two states differed in the degree of neural synchrony that was present within much of the brain. That is, movies led to significantly more neural synchrony compared to rest, except for in parts of the prefrontal cortex. Taken together, these results suggest that 1) autistic children have more distinct experiences when processing naturalistic stimuli compared to those without autism, 2) adolescents with higher cognitive scores have more similar experiences with each other when watching a movie compared to those with lower scores, and 3) although children’s brain networks during movie watching and rest have a similar functional architecture, processing a film leads to neural synchrony, whereas resting state does not.