Movie-watching [Neurosurgery Wiki]

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====== Movie-watching  ======

**Journal**: Nature Communications  
**Title**: Movie-watching evokes ripple-like activity within events and at event boundaries  
**Authors**: Marta Silva, Xiongbo Wu, Marc Sabio, Estefanía Conde-Blanco, Pedro Roldán, et al.  
**Date**: 1 July 2025  
**DOI**: 10.1038/s41467-025-60788-0  
**Study type**: Human intracranial electrophysiology (observational / exploratory)

===== 🎯 Aim =====

To investigate whether **ripple-like activity** (a neural oscillatory pattern ~80–120 Hz, known from hippocampal sharp-wave ripples) occurs in humans during **naturalistic experiences**, particularly during **movie watching**, and whether such ripples align with **event boundaries** and **within-event saliency**.

===== 🧠 Methods =====

  * **Participants**: 14 epilepsy patients undergoing iEEG (intracranial EEG).
  * **Stimuli**: Narrative films with annotated **event boundaries**.
  * **Analysis**:
    * Detection of ripple-like events in medial temporal lobe (MTL) and other regions.
    * Temporal alignment with annotated cognitive events.
    * Comparison of ripple rate and power across boundary vs. within-event segments.

===== ✅ Key Findings =====

  * Ripple-like activity increases at **event boundaries**, suggesting encoding or segmentation functions.
  * Ripples also increase **within events**, especially during emotionally or perceptually salient moments.
  * Stronger ripple coupling was observed across MTL and high-level cortical regions (e.g., precuneus, medial PFC).

===== 📉 Limitations =====

  * **Epilepsy bias**: All subjects were patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, which may affect generalizability.
  * **Correlational design**: Cannot determine causal role of ripples in perception or memory.
  * **Ripple detection thresholds**: May vary across individuals and cortical regions; risk of false positives or artifact contamination.

===== 💡 Significance =====

  * Supports the idea that **cognitive event segmentation** in naturalistic contexts involves ripple-like neural dynamics.
  * Provides evidence that **memory-related oscillations** are not restricted to sleep or explicit tasks, but extend to real-life experiences.
  * Suggests new approaches to studying human cognition through **naturalistic paradigms** (e.g., movies) rather than artificial tasks.

===== 🧾 Conclusion =====

This exploratory iEEG study provides compelling evidence that ripple-like activity is modulated by **narrative event structure** during passive movie-watching. It contributes to bridging the gap between controlled cognitive neuroscience and real-world neural processing, though replication in non-clinical populations and mechanistic work is still needed.