Synchronous brain activity across individuals underlies shared psychological perspectives

摘要: For successful communication, we need to understand the external world consistently with others. This task requires sufficiently similar cognitive schemas or psychological perspectives that act as filters guide selection, interpretation and storage of sensory information, perceptual objects events. Here show when individuals adopt a perspective during natural viewing, their brain activity becomes synchronized in specific regions. We measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 33 healthy participants who viewed 10-min movie twice, assuming once ‘social’ (detective) ‘non-social’ (interior decorator) Pearson's correlation coefficient was used derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures (inter-subject correlations; ISCs) MRI data. k-nearest-neighbor support vector machine classifiers well Mantel test on ISC matrices reveal areas wherein predicted participants' current perspective. stronger several regions—most robustly parahippocampal gyrus, posterior parietal cortex lateral occipital cortex—when rather than different perspectives. Synchronization not explained by differences visual sampling movies, estimated eye gaze. propose synchronous across adopting could be an important neural mechanism supporting shared understanding environment.