Schedule of Events | Symposia

Functional connectivity in dynamic brain networks across different levels of suspense during naturalistic viewing.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Aleah Davis¹ (aleah5sos@gmail.com), Sakshi Dawan¹, Matthew Bezdek², Shella Keilholz³, Eric Schumacher¹; ¹School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, ²Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, ³Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University/Georgia Institute of Technology

An important narrative tool used to elicit emotions and draw attention is suspense, which is characterized by its ability to evoke excited or anxious uncertainty about what will happen in a story. A goal in human neuroscience is to understand how our brain modulates shifts in arousal that are required to maintain attention in everyday-life. Through fMRI data analysis, patterns of activity in dynamic brain networks have been shown to fluctuate at rest and across different tasks. These have been coined Quasi Periodic Patterns (QPPs) and are recurring low-frequency cyclical patterns that fluctuate every ~20 seconds. Brain networks implicated in these patterns include the default mode network (DMN) and the task positive network (TPN), whose activation increases with internally and externally directed attention respectively. Another network is the ventral attention network (VAN), which has shown higher activation in response to contextual cueing and stimuli driven attentional control. Previous studies in our lab have collected fMRI data from 32 participants who watched ~3min movie clips with varying suspense levels. Using this data, we investigated how the correlations between activity in dynamic brain networks changed across suspense levels at specific time points during naturalistic viewing. An increase in overall suspense in clips lead to higher negative correlation in activity between the DMN and the fronto-parietal network, as compared to clips lower in suspense. There was also an increase in dynamic connectivity between the fronto-parietal network and VAN. This emphasizes QPP’s potential use as a biomarker that can be used to understand arousal.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other