Brain-thought states during movie-watching reflect shared sensory anchors and film- and person- specific processes in association cortex

Naturalistic paradigms such as movie-watching have transformed functional neuroimaging by capturing cognitive dynamics during rich, real-world experiences. A fundamental challenge, however, is determining whether the neural signatures identified during these experiences reflect general principles of cognition or the specific contexts in which they are measured. To address this question, we combined fMRI data from participants watching eight diverse films with continuous reports of ongoing thought. We found that the generalizability of brain-thought relationships depends on the cognitive process being recruited. Neural signatures linked to sensory processing remained robust across films, whereas those involving memory-related association networks depended on how we modelled between-film variability, indicating that cognition becomes increasingly context-dependent along the cortical hierarchy from sensory to association cortex. Within default and limbic networks, we identified two contrasting memory-related states with opposite consequences for comprehension. One, reflecting the integration of prior knowledge with ongoing experience, predicted better narrative comprehension and was revealed only after accounting for between-film variability. The other, associated with stimulus-independent thought, predicted poorer comprehension and emerged only when between-film variability was not modelled. Together, these findings establish when brain-experience relationships measured during naturalistic paradigms can generalize across contexts and when they instead reflect interactions between cognition and the specific environments in which cognition unfolds. More broadly, the consistency of a given brain-experiential association may depend less on where it occurs in the brain and more on the viewer’s contextual experience: perceiving the film, drawing on memory to understand it, or drifting away.