Abstract
Cinematic media (e.g. film, television) possesses a remarkable ability to synchronise audiences' neural, behavioural, and physiological responses. This synchrony, sometimes termed the 'tyranny of film' is largely considered to arise from low-level visual features and editing conventions. Recently, evidence has suggested that synchrony may also emerge from shared interpretation of narrative. However, no study to date has aimed to assess the relative contributions of narrative and low-level features towards synchrony. We designed a study in which participants (n=60) were presented with a 55-minute episode of the BBC television drama The Tourist. Content was presented to participants in one of two modalities: audio-only with audio-description, or visual-only with subtitles. In this way, the presentations shared no low-level features, but participants experienced the same narrative. During the sessions, we recorded participant's heart rate, and computed synchrony from this physiological measure using intersubject correlation analysis. We found evidence that synchrony was higher in the audio versus visual condition, however no significant differences were found between either visual or audio conditions and synchrony between-groups (i.e. narrative condition). Further, when modelling heart rate, 22% of variance could be explained by narrative, compared to 1.7% from low-level saliency. Saliency was derived through Itti, Koch, & Niebur’s (1998) saliency model, and computing root mean square energy from the audio track. Our results provide strong support for the idea that processing of a narrative can lead to markedly similar physiological responses across an audience. This effect is likely high-level, and cannot be explained by visual or auditory salience alone.