Characterizing Relationships Between Fluctuating Cognitive and Neural States During Movie Watching

Human experience fluctuates throughout time. The relationship of these subjective experiences to changing brain states has yet to be fully understood. We used an existing MRI dataset in which participants watched movies in the scanner. In an online study, we had participants continuously rate their subjective experiences while watching the same movie clips. We expand on prior research identifying four common latent neural states by looking at the relationship between occurrence of these states and subjective experience. Participant responses of either engagement, arousal, valence, social interaction, focus, curiosity, relatability, importance, surprise, comprehension, or boredom were then compared to the latent state occurrences of either the default mode network (DMN), dorsal attention network (DAN), somatosensory motor (SM), or base states. When the DMN state occurred, participants indicated higher levels of engagement, arousal, external focus, positivity, and sociality. When the DAN state occurred, participants indicated higher levels of surprise, and lower levels of boredom and social interaction. When the SM state occurred, participants indicated low levels of engagement, arousal, curiosity, importance and surprise, as well as negativity, internal focus, and high levels of relatability and boredom. Lastly, when the base state, characterized as a transition hub between states (Song et al., 2022) occurred, participants rated high levels of curiosity and importance and low relatability. Our results show that latent brain state occurrence tracks subjective experience, providing insight into how latent state activity is related to conscious experience.