Store:Exel12

Methods

Data acquisition

Twenty-eight healthy subjects were recruited from The Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario, Canada to participate in this study. Informed written consent was acquired prior to testing from all participants. Ethics approval for this study was granted by the Health Sciences Research Ethics Board and the Non-Medical Research Ethics Board of The University of Western Ontario and all research was performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines/regulations and in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Two suspenseful movie clips were used as the naturalistic stimuli in this study. A video clip from the silent film “Bang! You’re Dead” and an audio excerpt from the movie “Taken” were shown to 13 and 15 subjects respectively in both their original intact and scrambled forms. Prior to the two acquisitions, a section of rest was acquired where the subjects were asked to relax, without any overt stimulation. Stimulus presentation was controlled with the Psychtoolbox plugin for MATLAB on a 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. Audio were presented binaurally at a comfortable listening volume through Etymotics ER-1 headphones.

EEG data were collected using a 129-channel cap (Electrical Geodesics Inc. [EGI], Oregon, USA). Electrode impedances were kept below 50 kΩ with signals sampled at 250 Hz and referenced to the central vertex (Cz). Using the EEGLAB MATLAB toolbox, noisy channels were identified and removed, then interpolated back into the data. A Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test on the data was used to identify regions that were not Gaussian. Independent components analysis (ICA) was then used to visually identify patterns of neural activity characteristic of eye and muscle movements which were subsequently removed from the data. EEG pre-processing was performed individually for each subject and condition.

Of the two movie clips tested, the first was an 8-min segment from Alfred Hitchcock’s TV silent movie “Bang! You’re Dead”. This scene portrays a 5-year-old boy who picks up his uncle’s revolver. The boy loads a bullet into the gun and plays with it as if it were a toy. The boy (and viewer) rarely knows whether the gun has a bullet in its chamber and suspense builds as the boy spins the chamber, points it at others, and pulls the trigger. As an alternative to visual stimulation, a 5-min audio excerpt from the movie “Taken” was also used. This clip portrays a phone conversation in which a father overhears his daughters’ kidnapping.

Furthermore, two “scrambled” control stimuli were used—one for each movie. This separates the neural responses elicited by the sensory properties of watching or listening to the movies from those involved in following the plot. The scrambled version of “Bang! You’re Dead” was generated by isolating 1 s segments and pseudorandomly shuffling the segments, thereby eliminating the temporal coherence of the narrative . The scrambled version of “Taken” was created by spectrally rotating the audio, thus rendering the speech indecipherable. The scrambled movie clips were presented before the intact versions to prevent potential carry-over effects of the narrative. Prior to subjects watching/listening to the scrambled stimulus a short segment of resting EEG was acquired.