Dynamic Brain Network States during Suspenseful Film Viewing

Abstract

Studies of brain activity evoked by naturalistic stimuli have found narrative suspense produces reliable patterns of activation consistent with increased attention to the narrative and decreased processing of non-narrative stimuli (Bezdek et al., 2015). Yet the progression of brain states (i.e. patterns of activity levels across the whole brain) at suspense peaks and how they differ from suspense valleys or resting state scans has not previously been investigated. We used a fast fMRI acquisition sequence to measure sub-second brain states at peaks and valleys of narrative suspense and during rest. We found five brain states that occur during suspenseful film viewing, four of which differ in their frequency near suspense peaks compared to valleys. The pattern of results is consistent with the theoretical view that suspense captures and focuses attentional processing, triggering subsequent cognitive processing of narrative events.