Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments

We outline general theoretical and practical implications of what we promote as enactive cinema for the neuroscientific study of online socio-emotional interaction. in a real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fmri) setting,participants are immersed in cinematic experiences that simulate social situations. while viewing,their physiological reactions-including brain responses-are tracked,representing implicit and unconscious experiences of the on-going social situations. these reactions,in turn,are analyzed in real-time and fed back to modify the cinematic sequences they are viewing while being scanned. due to the engaging cinematic content,the proposed setting focuses on living-by in terms of shared psycho-physiological epiphenomena of experience rather than active coping in terms of goal-oriented motor actions. it constitutes a means to parametrically modify stimuli that depict social situations and their broader environmental contexts. as an alternative to studying the variation of brain responses as a function of a priori fixed stimuli,this method can be applied to survey the range of stimuli that evoke similar responses across participants at particular brain regions of interest. © 2012 tikka,väljamäe,de borst,pugliese,ravaja,kaipainenand takala.