A drama movie activates brains of holistic and analytical thinkers differentially

Abstract

People socialized in different cultures differ in their thinking styles. Eastern-culture people view objects more holistically by taking context into account, whereas Western-culture people view objects more analytically by focusing on them at the expense of context. Here we studied whether participants, who have different thinking styles but live within the same culture, exhibit differential brain activity when viewing a drama movie. A total of 26 Finnish participants, who were divided into holistic and analytical thinkers based on self-report questionnaire scores, watched a shortened drama movie during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We compared intersubject correlation (ISC) of brain hemodynamic activity of holistic vs analytical participants across the movie viewings. Holistic thinkers showed significant ISC in more extensive cortical areas than analytical thinkers, suggesting that they perceived the movie in a more similar fashion. Significantly higher ISC was observed in holistic thinkers in occipital, prefrontal and temporal cortices. In analytical thinkers, significant ISC was observed in right-hemisphere fusiform gyrus, temporoparietal junction and frontal cortex. Since these results were obtained in participants with similar cultural background, they are less prone to confounds by other possible cultural differences. Overall, our results show how brain activity in holistic vs analytical participants differs when viewing the same drama movie.

Fig. 1

Experimental procedure and ISC analysis in the movie-viewing task (figure taken from Bacha-Trams et al., 2017). (A) Participants viewed the same movie stimulus 4 times, in a 2 × 2 design, assuming that the movie characters are either genetically related or not as well as in the perspective of the to-be-donor sister Anna and in the perspective of the to-be-recipient sister Kate. The order of conditions was counterbalanced between participants. (B) To obtain the mean ISC, pair-wise correlations across participants were calculated between the time series of each voxel from all the fMRI recordings. Please note, that the ISC map in this figure shows exemplary data to illustrate the method.

Fig. 2

Scores and classification into analytical and holistic participants. After viewing the movie all participants were asked to answer a 24-item questionnaire (Choi et al., 2007) to assess their thinking style on a bipolar analytical–holistic dimension. Participants were divided into 2 groups with a cut-off at the median score of 123 across all participants, resulting in groups of 13 holistic and 13 analytical participants, respectively.

Fig. 3

Contrast between ISC of brain activity in the holistic vs analytical thinkers during watching of the movie (n = 26; lateral, medial and ventral view from top to bottom). Cold colors indicate higher ISC in analytical thinkers; warm colors indicate higher ISC in holistic thinkers. See text for details. MFG, middle frontal gyrus; MOG, middle occipital gyrus; MTG, middle temporal gyrus; MSFG, medial superior frontal gyrus; PC, postcentral gyrus; SUP, supramarginal gyrus; TP, temporal pole.

Fig. 4

Contrast of ISC of brain activity between the highest-scoring analytical and highest-scoring holistic thinkers on the bipolar scale during watching of the movie (n = 12; lateral, medial and ventral view from top to bottom). Cold colors indicate higher ISC in analytical thinkers; warm colors indicate higher ISC in holistic thinkers. MFG, middle frontal gyrus; MOG, middle occipital gyrus; MTG, middle temporal gyrus; PC, postcentral gyrus; SUP, supramarginal gyrus; TP, temporal pole.

Fig. 5

Eye tracking for the time course of the movie (n = 26; 1830 pair-wise comparisons; 712 time windows of 2 s). The mean correlations of the eye gaze patterns are shown in blue for the analytical thinking participants and in red for the holistic thinkers. The time windows shown in grey indicate significant differences between the correlated eye gaze patterns of both group, with a majority of time windows showing higher correlations in holistic thinkers.