Abstract
Neurocinematics is an emerging discipline in neuroscience, which aims to provide new filmmaking techniques by analyzing the brain activities of a group of audiences. Several neurocinematics studies attempted to track temporal changes in mental states during movie screening; however, it is still needed to develop efficient and robust electroencephalography (EEG) features for tracking brain states precisely over a long period. This study proposes a novel method for estimating emotional arousal changes in a group of individuals during movie screening by employing steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), which is a widely used EEG response elicited by the presentation of periodic visual stimuli. Previous studies have reported that the emotional arousal of each individual modulates the strength of SSVEP responses. Based on this phenomenon, movie clips were superimposed on a background, eliciting an SSVEP response with a specific frequency. Two emotionally arousing movie clips were presented to six healthy male participants, while EEG signals were recorded from the occipital channels. We then investigated whether the movie scenes that elicited higher SSVEP responses coincided well with those rated as the most impressive scenes by 37 viewers in a separate experimental session. Our results showed that the SSVEP response averaged across six participants could accurately predict the overall impressiveness of each movie, evaluated with a much larger group of individuals.
Highlights
Neurocinematics is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that aims to provide a new method to quantitatively evaluate films or movie contents by employing neuroscientific techniques to analyze viewers’ brain activities during movie screening (Hasson et al, 2008)
We proposed a new method for estimating emotional arousal changes in a group of individuals during video screening by employing a novel visual stimulation method that overlays a background state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) stimulus on a video clip
We first confirmed that the SSVEP response was stably evoked by the proposed visual stimulus throughout the screening of the movie clip (Figure 3)
Summary
Neurocinematics is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that aims to provide a new method to quantitatively evaluate films or movie contents by employing neuroscientific techniques to analyze viewers’ brain activities during movie screening (Hasson et al, 2008). In the earliest neurocinematics study, participants lay on their backs in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and watched short movie clips, while their brain activities were recorded using functional MRI (fMRI) (Hasson et al, 2004). Inter-subject correlation (ISC) was implemented to Emotional Arousal Estimation Using SSVEP measure the inter-subject synchronization of cortical activities. The ISC index effectively indicated the similarity between the viewers’ brain activities and the response to the presented movie content. The authors demonstrated the feasibility of using the ISC index to assess the impact of different filmmaking styles on viewers’ brains. Most neurocinematics studies have been conducted based on fMRI (Naci et al, 2014; Kauttonen et al, 2015; di Oleggio Castello et al, 2020)
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