Fig. 1: Method and change in alignment across all movie clips and groups.
From: Consensus-building conversation leads to neural alignment
Top: Participants (n = 49) viewed five ambiguous movie clips during brain scanning, then met in small groups and discussed the movies with the goal of reaching a consensus interpretation. Participants re-watched the movie clips during brain scanning, as well as novel clips from later in each movie. At each step, participants filled out a survey capturing their interpretations. Linear regression was used to model change in inter-subject correlation (ISC) (see Methods). Bottom left: Change in neural alignment caused by consensus-building conversation. Color shows the multiple regression beta weight for being in any conversation group, across all five movie clips (n = 703 unordered participant pairs from 9 conversation groups, control group excluded). Results were thresholded at a two-tailed permutation test P-value of 0.05 corrected for multiple comparisons. Brain maps created using AFNI/SUMA. Bottom right: Participants whose survey answers became similar showed greater neural alignment (n = 3478 unordered participant pairs across all movie clips, including control group participants that did not converse). The central diagonal line and shaded region show the regression line of best fit and its 95% confidence interval. Violin plots use width to represent the density of the distribution, with a central dashed line showing the median and dotted lines showing the lower and upper quartiles. “Brain” icon by Clockwise from Noun Project, available at https://thenounproject.com/icon/brain-1080481/. “Meeting” icon by SBTS from Noun Project, available at https://thenounproject.com/icon/meeting-5279011/. “Clipboard” by Made by Made from Noun Project, available at https://thenounproject.com/icon/clipboard-674066/. “Film” icon by NeueDeutsche from Noun Project, available at https://thenounproject.com/icon/film-531914/.
