Figure 4
Scenes with high suspense induce inter-subject synchronization by increasing the co-occurrence of the movie-related whole-brain connectivity pattern. (A) Suspenseful scenes increase pattern co-occurrence during movie watching. The dark gray line shows the variations in the average suspense rating. Entropy (light blue line) of the pattern distribution among participants at each time point is used as an instantaneous co-occurrence measure. Lower entropy values indicate higher co-occurrence. Note the negative relationship between the suspense rating and the entropy values: scenes with higher suspense ratings are followed by a decrease in entropy and thus an increased co-occurrence of the patterns among participants. (B) Scatter plot of the average suspense rating and the subsequent entropy values (6 s after the suspense rating). We found a significant negative correlation between the two measures (rho = − 0.2548; p = 0.0002). (C) Instantaneous co-occurrence during suspenseful scenes is associated with the movie-specific pattern. Temporal consistency of the whole-brain connectivity patterns in the movie (middle panel) and scrambled movie (bottom panel) watching condition. Variations in the average suspense rating can be found in the top panel. The dominant pattern at a given time point is indicated by a color code. The y-axis shows the percentage of across-participant consistency. The overall occurrence probability of each pattern in the conditions (Fig. 2A) is subtracted from the instantaneous consistency in order to assess consistency exceeding random occurrence. Note the higher consistency values in the movie condition compared to the scrambled movie condition. Pattern 2 (blue) was the dominant pattern during increased suspense, reaching up to 65% excess consistency during movie watching.
