Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition: a media-informed approach to naturalistic neuroscience

So-called ‘naturalistic’ stimuli have risen in popularity in cognitive, social and affective neuroscience over the last 15 years. However, a critical property of these stimuli is frequently overlooked: Media—like film, television, books and podcasts—are ‘fundamentally not natural’. They are deliberately crafted products meant to elicit particular human thought, emotion and behavior. Here, we argue for a more informed approach to adopting media stimuli in experimental paradigms. We discuss the pitfalls of combining stimuli that are designed for research with those that are designed for other purposes (e.g. entertainment) under the umbrella term of ‘naturalistic’ and present strategies to improve rigor in the stimulus selection process. We assert that experiencing media should be considered a task akin to any other experimental task(s) and explain how this shift in perspective will compel more nuanced and generalizable research using these stimuli. Throughout, we offer theoretical and practical knowledge from multidisciplinary media research to raise the standard for the treatment of media stimuli in neuroscience research.