A core goal of cognitive neuroscience is to understand how sensory input describing events in the external world is translated into the patterns of thoughts we experience in our lives. Complex naturalistic states, such as movie-watching, are important paradigms to understand this process because they allow cognition and brain dynamics to be understood in a situation that maps directly onto experiences in the real world (Finn and Bandettini, 2021; Hasson et al., 2008b; Haxby et al., 2020; Vanderwal et al., 2019; Matusz, 2019). Developments in cognitive neuroscience, leveraging state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have established core features of neural patterns that emerge across participants during movie-watching tasks (Hasson et al., 2008b), highlighting their similarity across individuals (Nastase et al., 2019) and their links to memory for information in the films (Hasson et al., 2008a). However, it is more difficult to reliably map ongoing thought patterns in this context since experiential sampling, the gold-standard for tracking thought patterns (Smallwood et al., 2021b), has the potential to disrupt the natural unfolding of brain activity during movie-watching. The goal of our study was to minimize the disruptive impact of sampling ongoing experience by using a novel approach that allows us to explicitly link patterns of ongoing thought to brain activity during movie-watching at specific moments in a film.

Contemporary theories of ongoing thought suggest that a primary dimension to differentiate subjective experiences is the extent to which they depend on immediate sensory input (Smallwood et al., 2021b; Smallwood, 2013a). Cognitive states that are ‘coupled’ to events in the immediate environment are assumed to be linked to greater cortical processing of sensory input (Smallwood et al., 2008a), better task performance, and memory for events in narrative comprehension tasks like reading (Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna, 2013; Smallwood et al., 2008b; Zhang et al., 2022). In contrast, perceptually ‘decoupled’ states from sensory input, such as the experience of mind-wandering (Smallwood and Schooler, 2006; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015), provide an opportunity to pursue thoughts derived from memory (Zhang et al., 2022; Medea et al., 2018) but can be linked to compromised task performance and worse memory for events (Schooler et al., 2011). Moreover, in situations where comprehension is important, states of distraction are hypothesized to be linked to poor executive control (Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna, 2013; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015; McVay and Kane, 2010). Given that movie-watching provides a situation where dynamic changes in visual and auditory input drive a complex multi-sensory narrative, movie-watching provides an ecologically valid opportunity to understand how ongoing thought patterns map onto neural activation patterns in a naturalistic context. Recent work has shown that high-order regions, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), are crucial in processing affective experiences during naturalistic stimuli, with distinct brain regions associated with different emotional expressions (Chang et al., 2021). These findings suggest that the brain undergoes continuous reorganization in naturalistic paradigms like movie-watching, and is sensitive to changes in psychological states, in this case affect. Our study aims to complement these approaches through the development of a novel experience sampling approach with which to understand how the changing patterns of brain activity that emerge during movie-watching relate to the different types of psychological experience that emerge in these moments of a film. In our study, we acquired experiential data in one group of participants while watching a movie clip and used these data to understand brain activity recorded in a second set of participants who watched the same clip and for whom no experiential data was recorded. This approach is similar to what is known as ‘collaborative filtering’ (Chang et al., 2021).

Consistent with the notion that movie-watching is a perceptually coupled state, recent work in cognitive neuroscience suggests an important role for primary systems, such as visual and auditory cortices (Finn, 2021). However, studies also hypothesize a role for regions of association cortex linked to higher order thought, such as the default mode network (DMN) or the frontoparietal network (FPN; Hasson et al., 2008b; Vanderwal et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2023). For example, the DMN is hypothesized to be important in social cognition, episodic memory, and conceptual knowledge — all of which are likely important for understanding the narrative of the film (for a review of the broad role the DMN plays in cognition, see Smallwood et al., 2021a). However, the DMN has also been implicated in perceptually decoupled states, such as mind-wandering, that are likely antagonistic to movie-watching (Zhang et al., 2022; Christoff et al., 2009; Konu et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2019).

Similarly, the FPN is important for multiple tasks, including those superficially different from movies, such as working memory maintenance, reflecting these networks' hypothesized role in goal maintenance (D’Esposito and Postle, 2015; Chenot et al., 2021). Contemporary views of ongoing thought argue that the FPN is likely important in suppressing distraction, including reductions in self-generated states like mind-wandering (Vago and Zeidan, 2016). Although studies have highlighted the role of both primary sensory and higher-order systems in movie-watching (Vanderwal et al., 2019; Rohr et al., 2018), our lack of a formal understanding of the mapping between thought patterns when we watch films and associated patterns of brain activity means the specific role that different brain systems play in the experience of movie-watching remains largely a matter of speculation (Demertzi et al., 2019).

Our experiment was designed to better understand how the changing patterns of brain activity at different moments during a film map onto the ongoing thoughts accompanying them. Previous work has shown that shared conscious experiences can be linked to common neural codes, suggesting that when individuals engage in movie-watching, their brains may exhibit synchronized activity (Chang et al., 2021; Naci et al., 2014). Given that brain activity is synchronized across individuals, it could also be the case that there are shared thought patterns that also emerge (i.e. shared patterns of experience) and if they do, these may also show links to common changes in brain activity. In our study, we used multi-dimensional experience sampling (mDES) to describe ongoing thought patterns during the movie-watching experience (Smallwood et al., 2021b). mDES is an experience sampling method that identifies different features of thought by probing participants about multiple dimensions of their experiences. mDES can provide a description of a person’s thoughts, generating reliable thought patterns across laboratory cognitive tasks (Smallwood et al., 2021a; Konu et al., 2021; Turnbull et al., 2021) and in daily life (Mckeown et al., 2021; Mulholland et al., 2023), and is sensitive to accompanying changes in brain activity when reports are gained during scanning (Konu et al., 2020; Turnbull et al., 2019a). Studies that use mDES to describe experience ask participants to provide experiential reports by answering a set of questions about different features of their thought on a continuous scale from 1 (Not at all) to 10 (Completely; Konu et al., 2020; Konu et al., 2021; Turnbull et al., 2021; Mckeown et al., 2021; Mulholland et al., 2023; Turnbull et al., 2019a; Ho et al., 2020; Karapanagiotidis et al., 2017; Mckeown et al., 2023; Vatansever et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2018). Each question describes a different feature of experience, such as if their thoughts are oriented in the future or the past, about oneself or other people, deliberate or intrusive in nature, and more (see Methods for a full list of questions used in the current study).

One challenge that arises when attempting to map the dynamics of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching is accounting for the inherently disruptive nature of experience sampling: to measure experience with sufficient frequency to map experiential reports during movies would inherently disrupt the natural processes of the brain and alter the viewer’s experience (for example, by pausing the film at a moment of suspense). Therefore, if we periodically interrupt viewers to acquire a description of their thoughts while recording brain activity, this could impact capturing important dynamic features of the brain. On the other hand, if we measured fMRI activity continuously over movie-watching (as is usually the case), we would lack the capacity to directly relate brain signals to the corresponding experiential states. Thus, to overcome this obstacle, we developed a novel methodological approach using two independent samples of participants. In the current study, one set of 120 participants was probed with mDES five times across the three ten-minute movie clips (11 min total, no sampling in the first minute). We used a jittered sampling technique where probes were delivered at different intervals across the film for different people depending on the condition they were assigned. Probe orders were also counterbalanced to minimize the systematic impact of prior and later probes at any given sampling moment. We used these data to construct a precise description of the dynamics of experience for every 15 s of three 10-min movie clips. These data were then combined with fMRI data from a different sample of 44 participants who had already watched these clips without experience sampling (Aliko et al., 2020). By combining data from two different groups of participants, our method allows us to describe the time series of different experiential states (as defined by mDES) and relate these to the time series of brain activity in another set of participants who watched the same films with no interruptions. In this way, our study set out to explicitly understand how the patterns of thoughts that dominate different moments in a film in one group of participants relate to the brain activity at these time points in a second set of participants and, therefore, better understand the contribution of different neural systems to the movie-watching experience.

Our study aimed to identify how patterns of thought during movie-watching relate to brain activity during movie clips from three different films: Citizenfour (a documentary), Little Miss Sunshine (a comedy), and 500 Days of Summer (a romance). We used open-source fMRI data from one group of participants (Sample 1) who watched these films while brain activity was recorded using fMRI. We then measured ongoing thought patterns using mDES in a second group of participants (Sample 2) for whom no brain activity was acquired (Figure 1). We used a novel sampling approach to build a detailed description of the time series of different thought patterns every 15 s in the clips while only sampling individual participants a relatively small number of times per movie, minimizing disruption of the subjective experience of movie-watching. Our analyses examined the overlap between the time series of brain activity in one group of participants (Sample 1) and reported thought patterns in a second group of participants (Sample 2) to reveal the relationship between brain activity at different moments in a film and the associated experiential states.

Across the movies, we identified four thought patterns. First, ‘Episodic knowledge’ was linked to experiences related to knowledge, the past, and the self. This pattern was also highest during the romance movie, specifically associated with better memory of information in this context and increased activity in dorsal medial regions of visual cortex by our state space and voxel space analysis. Second, ‘Intrusive Distraction’ was related to thoughts with intrusive, distracting features that were spontaneous in nature. This thought pattern predicted poorer overall comprehension across all the movies, was higher in the documentary, and emerged in moments during movies associated with reduced activation in regions of the FPN by our voxel space analysis. Third, ‘Verbal Detail’, which described experience as deliberate, detailed experiences in the form of words and with a negative emotional valance, was most prevalent in the documentary and associated with relative reductions in auditory cortex activation using our voxel space analysis. Finally, ‘Sensory Engagement’ was related to multi-modal sensory experience (loading on images, sounds, and people with a positive emotional tone). ‘Sensory Engagement’ was highest in the romance movie, associated with better comprehension performance across all movies, linked to activity in sensory cortex by both the voxel-based analysis and the state-space analysis, which were formally linked through a spin test.

Our study supports the hypothesis that perceptual coupling between the brain and external input is a core feature of making sense of events in movies (e.g. Smallwood, 2013b). For example, ‘Sensory Engagement’, a pattern of enjoyable multi-sensory experience, was linked to better memory for information across all the movies and emerged when activity was high in both auditory and visual cortexes (regions at the sensory end of the principle gradient of functional brain organization, Margulies et al., 2016). ‘Sensory Engagement’ was the thought pattern with the most consistent and most apparent links to the brain since it was the only thought pattern that showed a brain-thought mapping across our voxel- and state-space analysis that were formally linked using a spin test (see Figures 2 and 6). Similarly, reports of ‘Episodic Knowledge’ emerged when brain activity was high within a dorsal region of visual cortex and was linked to better comprehension in one of the films (500 Days of Summer). Together, these data provide important corroboration for the hypothesis that states of sensory coupling support better memory for environmental events (Smallwood et al., 2021b; Smallwood, 2013a). Further, they also provide support for contemporary perspectives that movie-watching is a useful and important paradigm for understanding the brain basis behind naturalistic states because it allows brain function to be understood through the lens of a state rich in complex sensory input (Finn, 2021).

Our study also provides support for the hypothesized role the frontoparietal system plays in supporting states of non-distracted focus during movie-watching. Reports of ‘Intrusive Distraction’ were the only thought pattern associated with activity outside primary sensory systems and was seen to emerge at moments in films when activity during regions within the FPN was reduced See Figure 4—figure supplement 4 for the overlap between the regions identified linked to ‘Intrusive Distraction’ and the FPN as defined by Yeo and colleagues (Yarkoni et al., 2011). Interestingly, the association between greater distraction and reduced activity within the FPN is consistent with this network’s assumed role in goal maintenance (Cole and Schneider, 2007). This result also confirms predictions from psychological research that states of distraction, like mind-wandering, often emerge when executive control is reduced (McVay and Kane, 2010). This hypothesis gains further support for the consistent negative association with comprehension. Notably, ‘Intrusive Distraction’ was the only component that showed no evidence of temporal variation across the movie clips we sampled. It is possible, therefore, that processes that drive the occurrence of states such as ‘Intrusive Distraction’ are likely to depend on individual and contextual factors (e.g. poor executive control McVay and Kane, 2010; McVay and Kane, 2012) and/or intrinsic changes in brain activity. Recently, a study using intracranial recordings established that periods of distraction, with similar features to those observed in this study, occur when sharp wave ripples within the hippocampus are common (Iwata et al., 2024). It is likely, therefore, that further research may be necessary to understand the brain-cognition mappings which lead to distraction. For example, in the future, we can systematically explore conditions in which this state is more or less present and highlight deviations from the mean as markers to better understand states of cognition that are less related to a state of perceptual coupling than are other features of movie-watching. Notably, using mDES, we can also identify the same thought pattern in our analysis in daily life research (Mckeown et al., 2021; Mulholland et al., 2023), suggesting this thought pattern occurs in situations beyond movie-watching. Further investigation using mDES, for example with other forms of media, and other methods of brain imaging, can improve our understanding of what lead to the onset of distracted states.

Although our study highlighted neural activity in sensory cortex and regions of association cortex with the frontoparietal system, we found less evidence for the hypothesized role of the DMN during the movie-watching experience. Notably, the pattern of ‘Episodic Knowledge’ identified by our analysis focuses on features of cognition such as knowledge, people, and oneself — all of which are terms that previous literature suggests could relate to the DMN (Smallwood et al., 2021b; Yang et al., 2023). However, despite this conceptual mapping, neither our voxel space nor our state space analysis highlighted that this experience was related to moments when brain activity was higher within the DMN (See Figures 3 and 6).

There are several possible methodological reasons why such a mapping within the DMN may nonetheless exist. For example, our choice of films (documentary, romance, and comedy) may have precluded a genre in which the DMN may play a more obvious role (e.g. mystery or suspense). Another possibility is that the DMN may be relevant to an understanding aspect of experience that is only captured during longer intervals of movie-watching, such as extended plot lines, unexpected events, or other features of movies that depend on the segmentation of a movie into different events (Geerligs et al., 2022). We only sampled experience in short 10 min clips, so the DMN may relate to aspects of experience that are important for movie-watching over longer time periods. It is also possible that the unique features of the DMN make it difficult for our method to reveal its role in experience. The DMN is a spatially heterogeneous system and highly variable across individuals (Braga and Buckner, 2017). Since our analytic approach links thought patterns in one set of individuals to brain activity in another, it could be challenging for this method to identify its role in movie-related thought patterns in a highly idiosyncratic brain network such as the DMN (Braga and Buckner, 2017; Daitch and Parvizi, 2018). This possibility could be easily tested by examining mappings between thought patterns and individuals using precision scanning methods (Gordon et al., 2017). Studies have also highlighted that the DMN is heterogeneous in the functions it is involved in and, in particular, is hypothesized to shift flexibly from perpetually decoupled to coupled states (Zhang et al., 2022). So, for example, the role this network is hypothesized to play in off-task or mind-wandering states (e.g. Christoff et al., 2009) may obscure its’ role in perceptually coupled states (like movie-watching).

It is important to note that while our study does not establish what role DMN plays in movie-watching states, it does highlight a clear role for sensory systems in experiential states that are time-locked, or ‘coupled’, to events in the film. Thus, based on our study, whatever role the DMN plays during movie-watching, it is likely to be built upon the foundational role sensory systems play in our thoughts and feelings while we watch films. Consistent with this possibility, contemporary views on the DMN argue that its function arises from its’ topographical location in the cortex (Smallwood et al., 2021b). According to this perspective, the DMN is located at the maximal distance from primary systems but also constitutes the apex of processing streams (like the ventral and dorsal streams Margulies et al., 2016). We have previously argued that whatever role the DMN plays in cognition may entail interactions with primary systems, possibly through the transformation of neural signals along different processing streams (Smallwood et al., 2021b). In other words, it is possible that the DMN plays a role in movie-watching that complements information processing in sensory input, an important but possibly less direct contribution to the movie-watching experience than regions in the visual or auditory cortex. Since the DMN is widely hypothesized to be important in movie-watching, we performed an exploratory functional connectivity analysis to examine whether the sensory regions we identified in our study are functionally coupled to the DMN at rest (see Figure 4—figure supplement 2). This revealed that sensory regions identified in our study shared a common set of regions within the DMN (including anterior regions of the temporal lobe and the inferior frontal gyrus; see Figure 4—figure supplement 2 and Figure 4—figure supplement 3). This analysis was exploratory, so any results should be treated with caution; however, it is consistent with the possibility that a more fine-grained precision mapping approach could identify the role these regions play in ongoing thought during movie-watching (Gordon et al., 2017).

In summary, our study used a novel paradigm to establish the role primary systems play during our experiences while we watch movies. Nonetheless, important questions about other features of experience during move-watching remain unanswered. For example, patterns of ‘Verbal Detail’ were associated with moments in the films where auditory cortex activation was reduced. This may reflect a shift in attention away from the processing of the auditory input related to the movie towards evaluative thoughts about the people or events in the film, perhaps in the form of inner speech (Mckeown et al., 2023). These thoughts may occur when participants form opinions about movie characters, elaborate on the context, or make inferences about the information they have encoded from the film (Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2015). This possibility could be easily explored by examining more specific experience sampling items that directly target inner speech or comprehension questions that target inferential processing on events within the movies (See Smallwood et al., 2008b).

Importantly, our study provides a novel method for answering these questions and others regarding the brain basis of experiences during films that can be applied simply and cost-effectively. As we have shown, mDES can be combined with existing brain activity, allowing information about both brain activity and experience to be determined at a relatively low cost. For example, the cost-effective nature of our paradigm makes it an ideal way to explore the relationship between cognition and neural activity during movie-watching during different genres of film. In neuroimaging, conclusions are often made using one film in naturalistic paradigm studies (Yang et al., 2023). Although the current study only used three movie clips, restraining our ability to form strong conclusions regarding how different patterns of thought relate to specific genres of film, in the future, it will be possible to map cognition across a more extensive set of movies and discern whether there are specific types of experience that different genres of films engage. One of the major strengths of our approach, therefore, is the ability to map thoughts across groups of participants across a wide range of movies at a relatively low cost.

Nonetheless, this paradigm is not without limitations. This is the first study, as far as we know, that attempts to compare experiential reports in one sample of participants with brain activity in a second set of participants, and while the utility of this method enables us to understand the relationship between thought and brain activity during movies, it will be important to extend our analysis to mDES data during movie-watching while brain activity is recorded. In addition, our study is correlational in nature, and in the future, it could be useful to generate a more mechanistic understanding of how brain activity maps onto the participants experience. Our analysis shows that mDES is able to discriminate between films, highlighting its broad sensitivity to variation in semantic or affective content. Armed with this knowledge, we propose that in the future, researchers could derive mechanistic insights into how the semantic features may influence the mDES data. For example, it may be possible to ask participants to watch movies in a scrambled order to understand how the structure of semantic or information influences the mapping between brains and ongoing experience as measured by mDES. Finally, our study focused on mapping group-level patterns of experience onto group-level descriptions of brain activity. In the future it may be possible to adopt a ‘precision-mapping’ approach by measuring longer periods of experience using mDES and determining how the neural correlates of experience vary across individuals who watched the same movies while brain activity was collected (Gordon et al., 2017). In the future, we anticipate that the ease with which our method can be applied to different groups of individuals and different types of media will make it possible to build a more comprehensive and culturally inclusive understanding of the links between brain activity and movie-watching experience.

Finally, it is worth considering whether the patterns of brain activity identified by our analysis reflect the stimuli that are processed during movie watching, or the cognitive and affective processing of this information. On the one hand, the regions we found were often within regions of sensory cortex, areas of the brain which are often ascribed basic stimulus processing functions (Kaas and Collins, 2001). Moreover, according to perspectives on cognition derived from more traditional task paradigms, complex features of cognition, such as the regulation of thought, are often attributed to regions of association cortex, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Turnbull et al., 2019a). It is possible, based on these views that the identification of regions of visual and auditory cortex by our study reflects the participants attention to sensory input, rather than the complex analysis of these inputs that may be required for certain features of the movie watching experience. On the other hand, it is possible that the movie-watching state is a qualitatively different type of mental state to those that emerge in typical task situations. For example, unlike tasks, the movie-watching state is characterized by multi-modal sensory input, semantically rich themes, that evolve together to reveals a continuous narrative to the viewer. It is possible, therefore, that these features allow movies to engender a situation an absorbed state where a relatively higher amount of processing are achieved in sensory cortex than would occur in traditional task paradigms (when systems in association cortex may be needed to maintain information related to task rules). Important headway into addressing this uncertainty can be achieved by using mDES to compare the types of states that occur in different contexts (including both movies and tasks) and comparing the topography of brain activity associated with different states.

All data and corresponding analysis scripts included in this manuscript are available via Mendeley Data (https://doi.org/10.17632/mgb7ftwr9d.1).

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Author details

1. Raven Star Wallace

   Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Formal analysis, Validation, Investigation, Visualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Writing – review and editing

   For correspondence

   raven.wallace@queensu.ca

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

   "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0009-0003-0414-0254

2. Bronte Mckeown

   Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

   Contribution

   Formal analysis, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

3. Ian Goodall-Halliwell

   Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

   Contribution

   Resources, Methodology, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

4. Louis Chitiz

   Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

   Contribution

   Validation, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

5. Philippe Forest

   Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

   Contribution

   Formal analysis, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

6. Theodoros Karapanagiotidis

   School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Nantes, France

   Contribution

   Formal analysis, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

7. Bridget Mulholland

   Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

   Contribution

   Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

8. Adam Turnbull

   Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

9. Tamara Vanderwal

   Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada

   Contribution

   Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

   Competing interests

   No competing interests declared

10. Samyogita Hardikar

    1. Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
    2. Max Planck School of Cognition, Leipzig, United Kingdom

    Contribution

    Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4380-5055

11. Tirso RJ Gonzalez Alam

    School of Psychology and Sport Science, Bangor University, Gwynedd, United Kingdom

    Contribution

    Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4510-2441

12. Boris C Bernhardt

    Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9256-6041

13. Hao-Ting Wang

    Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire de Geriatrie de Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Contribution

    Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

14. Will Strawson

    School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Nantes, France

    Contribution

    Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

15. Michael Milham

    Child Mind Institute, New York, United States

    Contribution

    Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

16. Ting Xu

    Child Mind Institute, New York, United States

    Contribution

    Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

17. Daniel S Margulies

    Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, University of Paris, Paris, France

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

18. Giulia L Poerio

    School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Nantes, France

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

19. Elizabeth Jefferies

    Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

20. Jeremy I Skipper

    Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Resources, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5503-764X

21. Jeffrey D Wammes

    Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8923-5441

22. Robert Leech

    Mathematical and Electrical Engineering Department, IMT Atlantique, Paris, France

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Software, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5801-6318

23. Jonathan Smallwood

    Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

    Contribution

    Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Validation, Investigation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Writing – review and editing

    Competing interests

    No competing interests declared

    "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7298-2459

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