Research with fMRI has contributed key insights about brain function to the fields of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science. This research most often uses resting-state or task paradigms, which both have significant shortcomings. In paradigms at rest e. g. the occurrence of microsleeps and the unknown timeframes in which processes occur, and the artificial nature and over-simplification of stimuli in task paradigms. As an alternative to the existing paradigms and their shortcomings, so-called naturalistic paradigms are emerging. These use stimuli that approximate natural/everyday stimuli, which participants view freely – without additional tasks. These kinds of stimuli preserve high levels of complexity and hold participants’ attention better than task paradigms. They can be used to successfully elicit different experiences. Despite the promising nature of naturalistic paradigms and the simplicity of their usage (especially for the participant), designing of naturalistic stimuli that can reliably evoke target experience in participants, remains a great challenge. Underresearched characteristics of naturalistic stimuli also present a challenge.
The goal of this Masters’ thesis was to create a set of naturalistic stimuli, evoke different target experience (fear, interoception (breathing) and somatosensory experience (jump into water)) and explore how reliably between participants experience is elicited. Additionally, we wanted to explore how much attention participants pay to the stimuli/to which degree they start mind-wandering and if knowing the actors of the film influences the experience during watching. We created seven two-minute clips to elicit target experience. The experience was explored in two steps; we performed microphenomenological interviews with eight participants and based on interview results created a questionnaire to explore clip-watching experience, which we used on a separate sample of 33 participants.
The results confirm previous findings that it is possible to successfully elicit target experience with naturalistic stimuli and that participants on average strongly experience attention to the clips. At the same time, the results show the importance of phenomenological exploration of experience. Knowing the movie, actors or derivations of the content can be a strongly present part of lived experience. We also see that the experience can vary greatly over the course of the clip, hence accounting for the time development or course of experience is crucial. The findings of this research offer a better insight into experience during viewing of used clips and contribute to the development and usage of naturalistic paradigms in future research.
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