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What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?

Live theater is typically designed to alter the state of mind of the audience. Indeed, the perceptual inputs issuing from a live theatrical performance are intended to represent something else, and the actions, emphasized by the writing and staging, are the key prompting the adhesion of viewers to f...

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Autores principales: Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle, Bressan, Yannick, Heider, Nathalie, Otzenberger, Hélène
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Research Foundation 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2936906/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20838472
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00059
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author Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle
Bressan, Yannick
Heider, Nathalie
Otzenberger, Hélène
author_facet Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle
Bressan, Yannick
Heider, Nathalie
Otzenberger, Hélène
author_sort Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle
collection PubMed
description Live theater is typically designed to alter the state of mind of the audience. Indeed, the perceptual inputs issuing from a live theatrical performance are intended to represent something else, and the actions, emphasized by the writing and staging, are the key prompting the adhesion of viewers to fiction, i.e., their belief that it is real. This phenomenon raises the issue of the cognitive processes governing access to a fictional reality during live theater and of their cerebral underpinnings. To get insight into the physiological substrates of adhesion we recreated the peculiar context of watching live drama in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, with simultaneous recording of heart activity. The instants of adhesion were defined as the co-occurrence of theatrical events determined a priori by the stage director and the spectators’ offline reports of moments when fiction acted as reality. These data served to specify, for each spectator, individual fMRI time-series, used in a random-effect group analysis to define the pattern of brain response to theatrical events. The changes in this pattern related to subjects’ adhesion to fiction, were investigated using a region of interest analysis. The results showed that adhesion to theatrical events correlated with increased activity in the left BA47 and posterior superior temporal sulcus, together with a decrease in dynamic heart rate variability, leading us to discuss the hypothesis of subtle changes in the subjects’ state of awareness, enabling them to mentally dissociate physical and mental (drama-viewing) experiences, to account for the phenomenon of adhesion to dramatic fiction.
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spelling pubmed-29369062010-09-13 What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching? Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle Bressan, Yannick Heider, Nathalie Otzenberger, Hélène Front Hum Neurosci Neuroscience Live theater is typically designed to alter the state of mind of the audience. Indeed, the perceptual inputs issuing from a live theatrical performance are intended to represent something else, and the actions, emphasized by the writing and staging, are the key prompting the adhesion of viewers to fiction, i.e., their belief that it is real. This phenomenon raises the issue of the cognitive processes governing access to a fictional reality during live theater and of their cerebral underpinnings. To get insight into the physiological substrates of adhesion we recreated the peculiar context of watching live drama in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, with simultaneous recording of heart activity. The instants of adhesion were defined as the co-occurrence of theatrical events determined a priori by the stage director and the spectators’ offline reports of moments when fiction acted as reality. These data served to specify, for each spectator, individual fMRI time-series, used in a random-effect group analysis to define the pattern of brain response to theatrical events. The changes in this pattern related to subjects’ adhesion to fiction, were investigated using a region of interest analysis. The results showed that adhesion to theatrical events correlated with increased activity in the left BA47 and posterior superior temporal sulcus, together with a decrease in dynamic heart rate variability, leading us to discuss the hypothesis of subtle changes in the subjects’ state of awareness, enabling them to mentally dissociate physical and mental (drama-viewing) experiences, to account for the phenomenon of adhesion to dramatic fiction. Frontiers Research Foundation 2010-08-19 /pmc/articles/PMC2936906/ /pubmed/20838472 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00059 Text en Copyright © 2010 Metz-Lutz, Bressan, Heider and Otzenberger. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noëlle
Bressan, Yannick
Heider, Nathalie
Otzenberger, Hélène
What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title_full What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title_fullStr What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title_full_unstemmed What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title_short What Physiological Changes and Cerebral Traces Tell Us about Adhesion to Fiction During Theater-Watching?
title_sort what physiological changes and cerebral traces tell us about adhesion to fiction during theater-watching?
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2936906/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20838472
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00059
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