title: Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments.
abstract: We outline general theoretical and practical implications of what we promote as enactive cinema for the neuroscientific study of online socio-emotional interaction. In a real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) setting, participants are immersed in cinematic experiences that simulate social situations. While viewing, their physiological reactions-including brain responses-are tracked, representing implicit and unconscious experiences of the on-going social situations. These reactions, in turn, are analyzed in real-time and fed back to modify the cinematic sequences they are viewing while being scanned. Due to the engaging cinematic content, the proposed setting focuses on living-by in terms of shared psycho-physiological epiphenomena of experience rather than active coping in terms of goal-oriented motor actions. It constitutes a means to parametrically modify stimuli that depict social situations and their broader environmental contexts. As an alternative to studying the variation of brain responses as a function of a priori fixed stimuli, this method can be applied to survey the range of stimuli that evoke similar responses across participants at particular brain regions of interest.
authors.affiliation: NeuroCine, Department of Film, Television and Scenography, School of ARTS, Aalto University Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Pia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tikka
authors.forename: Aleksander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Väljamäe
authors.forename: Aline W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: de Borst
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pugliese
authors.forename: Niklas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ravaja
authors.forename: Mauri
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kaipainen
authors.forename: Tapio
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Takala
keywords: Brain Computer Interfaces; enactive cinema; generative storytelling; implicit interaction; neurofeedback; real-time fMRI; social neuroscience