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Attentional engagement strengthens the neural representation fidelity of narrative features

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Anna Corriveau^1,2 (), Jin Ke³, Monica D. Rosenberg^1,2,4; ¹Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, ²Institute for Mind and Biology, University of Chicago, ³Department of Psychology, Yale University, ⁴Neuroscience Institute, University of Chicago

Although watching movies and listening to stories requires prolonged attention, fluctuations in attention lead to varying levels of engagement with these narratives. Do ongoing changes in attention affect the fidelity with which stimuli are represented in the brain? To test this question, we collected functional MRI data from 60 participants who watched or listened to four naturalistic narratives: two audio-visual movies, one silent movie, and one podcast. Following scanning, participants re-watched/heard all narratives while reporting their continuous subjective engagement using a slider bar. Narratives were segmented into visual scenes and spoken sentences. We extracted visual and auditory representations using the convolutional neural networks AlexNet and Wav2Vec for scenes and sentences, respectively. Brain representations were defined as voxel-level beta estimates for all scenes and sentences using least squares separate modeling. To compare stimulus and brain representations, we calculated representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) reflecting 1-Euclidean distance between brain- or stimulus-level representations for pairs of stimuli in high- and low-engagement timepoints separately. Finally, we compared the correlation of brain and stimulus RDMs for high- vs. low-engagement moments in all brain regions. Results revealed that high engagement is associated with increased alignment (p<.05) between brain and stimulus representations in large swaths of the brain across narratives. Findings suggest that changes in engagement during narratives dynamically modulate neural representation fidelity, indicating an increase in stimulus-driven processing with greater attention.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory