Research Area:
Understanding Audiences
People who share an identity — like political orientation — share neural activity, making them distinct from others.
If entertainment messaging promotes similar in-group activity, then neural synchrony may be a future tool for audience segmentation.
My Role
As the lead investigator, I designed this study to apply what we know about the correlation of neural synchrony with individuals’ preferences to entertainment audience segmentation.
I developed the original screening survey and all tasks, created promotional video materials as task stimuli, designed the technical parameters of the neuroimaging setup, recruited participants, collected data during in-person lab sessions and remotely through MTurk, analyzed behavioral and neuroimaging data, wrote a draft paper, and presented the results at conferences.
Tools and Techniques:
Qualtrics, Adobe Premiere Pro, Amazon MTurk, fNIRS software, Python, R, survey development, descriptive statistics, t-tests, Pearson correlation, ANOVA, multilevel regression
Does synchrony within audiences of sports and theater fans predict preference for entertainment messages?
Research Question
Background
Individuals with a shared identity, like political affiliation, show both behavioral and neural similarities. When entertainment content promotes strongly held fan identities, as with sports fans and theater aficionados, people with shared identities may also show neural synchrony during exposure to entertainment messages tailored for them. I tested whether sports fans and theater fans experienced neural synchrony when viewing promotional videos for sports and theater events, and if differences between the two groups allows us to use neural activity for audience segmentation.
Methods
Strength of participants’ (N=20, female) identities as sports and theater fans was measured in two ways: first, by a single-item self-identification question and second, by their score on a multi-item screening survey developed from previous fan identification surveys (e.g. Wann et al., 1995). Each participant individually viewed six 90-second promotional videos, three for sports events, and three for theater events, while having their brain activity recorded (Video Viewing Task). Videos were normed across eleven dimensions by online raters through MTurk. After watching each video, participants rated the event, providing a behavioral measure of their attitudes toward the video content (Video Rating Task).
Project Flow
Watching six promotional videos for sports and theater events provides a measure of neural synchrony across all participants. This gave us a way to compare activity within fan groups (sports vs. theater fans) and between fan groups.
Purpose of the Task
Video Rating Task
A four-question survey after each video measured behavioral intentions to purchase a ticket for the event, attend if given a ticket, recommend the event to others, and overall interest in watching the first 10 minutes of the event. This behavioral measure was later correlated with each participant’s fan identity and neural synchrony with their fan group.
Analysis
We measure neural synchrony as the correlation in brain activity across pairs of participants who shared their fan identity (congruent) and pairs who had different identities (incongruent) — this gave us a measure of pairwise intersubject correlation, which could be aggregated within and between groups. Behavioral intentions, our dependent variable, were also calculated for each individual, and a difference score was calculated for each pair of participants. We predicted these behavioral difference scores through multilevel regression models for each of 12 brain regions.
Across the audience of 20 women, behavioral intentions were closely aligned with self-identified and measured fan identification in both groups. Sports fans preferred sports events, and theater fans preferred theater events. It is not possible, however, to predict behavioral preferences (and therefore, fan identities) from within-group neural synchrony in any brain region. These results give insight into the types of identities and personal preferences which may be correlated with shared brain activity, such as political affiliations, and those which are not.
Results
Behaviorally, people who share identities (blue) are more similar than people who do not (black). But there is no relationship between shared identity and the similarity of brain activity in either group.
This is true for both theater fans (red) and sports fans (blue). The groups were similarly likely to agree on ratings for their preferred content, but showed no neural synchrony while watching that content.