School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Bristol Vision Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Sci Rep. 2024 Nov 2;14(1):26369. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-73066-8.
Audio-visual media possesses a remarkable ability to synchronise audiences' neural, behavioural, and physiological responses. This synchronisation is considered to reflect some dimension of collective attention or engagement with the stimulus. But what is it about these stimuli that drives such strong engagement? There are several properties of media stimuli which may lead to synchronous audience response: from low-level audio-visual features, to the story itself. Here, we present a study which separates low-level features from narrative by presenting participants with the same content but in separate modalities. In this way, the presentations shared no low-level features, but participants experienced the same narrative. We show that synchrony in participants' heart rate can be driven by the narrative information alone. We computed both visual and auditory perceptual saliency for the content and found that narrative was approximately 10 times as predictive of heart rate as low-level saliency, but that low-level audio-visual saliency has a small additive effect towards heart rate. Further, heart rate synchrony was related to a separate cohorts' continuous ratings of immersion, and that synchrony is likely to be higher at moments of increased narrative importance. Our findings demonstrate that high-level narrative dominates in the alignment of physiology across viewers.
视听媒体具有同步观众神经、行为和生理反应的非凡能力。这种同步被认为反映了集体注意力或对刺激的参与的某个维度。但是，这些刺激有什么特点能引起如此强烈的参与呢？媒体刺激有几个特性可能会导致观众的同步反应：从低水平的视听特征到故事本身。在这里，我们通过向参与者呈现不同模式的相同内容来将低水平特征与叙事分开，进行了一项研究。通过这种方式，呈现的内容没有低水平特征，但参与者体验到了相同的叙事。我们表明，参与者的心率同步可以仅由叙事信息驱动。我们计算了内容的视觉和听觉感知显著性，发现叙事对心率的预测性大约是低水平显著性的 10 倍，但低水平视听显著性对心率有较小的附加影响。此外，心率同步与另一组连续的沉浸感评分相关，并且在叙事重要性增加的时刻，同步性可能更高。我们的研究结果表明，在观众的生理同步方面，高层次的叙事占据主导地位。
