Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching.

Movie-watching is a central aspect of our lives and an important paradigm for understanding the brain mechanisms behind cognition as it occurs in daily life. Contemporary views of ongoing thought argue that the ability to make sense of events in the 'here and now' depend on the neural processing of incoming sensory information by auditory and visual cortex, which are kept in check by systems in association cortex. However, we currently lack an understanding of how patterns of ongoing thoughts map onto the different brain systems when we watch a film, partly because methods of sampling experience disrupt the dynamics of brain activity and the experience of movie-watching.

Macro-scale patterns in functional connectivity associated with ongoing thought patterns and dispositional traits.

Complex macro-scale patterns of brain activity that emerge during periods of wakeful rest provide insight into the organisation of neural function, how these differentiate individuals based on their traits, and the neural basis of different types of self-generated thoughts. Although brain activity during wakeful rest is valuable for understanding important features of human cognition, its unconstrained nature makes it difficult to disentangle neural features related to personality traits from those related to the thoughts occurring at rest. Our study builds on recent perspectives from work on ongoing conscious thought that highlight the interactions between three brain networks - ventral and dorsal attention networks, as well as the default mode network.