On the same wavelength: The relationship between neural synchrony and cognitive ability during movie watching in late childhood and early adolescence

Development during late childhood and early adolescence is associated with vast improvements to thinking and reasoning abilities. Coinciding with developing cognitive abilities, the environments children navigate become more complex, with an expanding social circle giving rise to richer and more elaborate experiences. If cognitive development is associated with more complex experiences, do individual differences in cognitive abilities influence how children and adolescents experience their world? To address this question, we investigated the relationships between intersubject correlation (ISC) during movie watching and cognitive scores in children and adolescents (aged 7 -15, N = 309). Data for the current study was obtained from the Healthy Brain Biobank. As part of the Healthy Brain Biobank protocol, participants watched a 10-minute clip of Despicable Me while in the fMRI scanner. They also completed the Weschler Intelligent Scale for Children (WISC). We compared the degree to which participants brain activity synchronized to other participants brain activity during the movie, as measured by ISC, and investigated if scores on the WISC predicted this synchrony. We found adolescents (ages 11-15) with higher cognitive scores showed greater ISC during movie watching in brain networks associated with social processing and executive functions compared to those with below average cognitive scores. These networks included the frontoparietal and default mode networks. This pattern was not evident in children (ages 7-11) who differed in their cognitive scores. These results suggest that adolescents with more mature cognitive abilities may have more similar experiences of naturalistic stimuli. Our results also suggest that children may be less reliant on the frontoparietal network when processing movies, compared to previous findings in adults.