Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory
The degree to which we are engaged in narratives fluctuates over time. What drives these changes in engagement, and how do they affect what we remember? To address these questions, I will first present evidence from behavioral studies in which individuals continuously reported their level of engagement as they watched a television show or listened to an audio-narrated story. People experienced similar fluctuations of engagement during narratives, and were more engaged during more emotional moments. I will next describe results from two functional MRI experiments demonstrating that changes in a pattern of functional brain connectivity predicted changes in how engaged people were in these same narratives. This predictive “engagement network” not only was related to a validated neuromarker of sustained attention, but also predicted what narrative events people recalled after the MRI scan. Together these findings reveal a robust, generalizable neural signature of attentional engagement in naturalistic contexts and elucidate relationships between narrative engagement, sustained attention, and event memory.