Attention Strongly Modulates Reliability of Neural Responses to Naturalistic Narrative Stimuli

摘要: Attentional engagement is a major determinant of how effectively we gather information through our senses. Alongside the sheer growth in amount and variety content that are presented with modern media, there increased variability degree to which "absorb" information. Traditional research on attention has illuminated basic principles sensory selection isolated features or locations, but it provides little insight into neural underpinnings attentional naturalistic content. Here, show human subjects reliability an individual's responses respect larger group highly robust index level narrative stimulus. Specifically, fast electroencephalographic evoked were more strongly correlated across when naturally attending auditory audiovisual narratives than was directed inward mental arithmetic task during stimulus presentation. This effect strongest for stimuli cohesive greatly reduced speech lacking meaning. For compelling narratives, remarkably strong, allowing perfect discrimination between state individuals. Control experiments rule out possible confounds related altered eye movement trajectories order We conclude activity reproduced viewing same movie sensitive viewer listener, aided by narrative.