Study reveals effect of media professionalization on cognitive neurodynamics

Professionalization in any field requires long experience and training. Over the past decades, studies have shown that the professionalization of athletes and artists creates differences in the behavior of the brain when performing activities related to their area of ​​expertise.

To detect the effects of media professionalization on the brain, a research team from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​Instituto Ràdio Televisió Espanyola and Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville conducted a study published in Frontiers in systems neuroscience in which audiovisual content was presented to a group of media professionals and a control group, with the aim of recording and analyzing their brain activity. The study covers what happens to audiovisual professionals when they watch media works, using a threefold approach: eye blink rate, brain electrical activity and functional connectivity.

The researchers observed that audiovisual cuts have a greater impact on media professionals, causing their blinking rate to decrease, while non-professionals are not affected in the same way when viewing these. cuts. They also found that the experience of media professionals has a greater effect on the mu rhythm of the brain in the somatosensory area immediately after a cut. Non-media professionals, however, demonstrate a very diverse Granger causality in terms of connectivity compared to their media professional counterparts, whose connectivity is much more concise in the visual cortex, somatomotor and frontal areas.

Videos and other audiovisual content are filled with cuts that artificially segment the narrative content. Movies can contain dozens or even hundreds of clippings, and viewers are unaware of this, however. Previous studies by the same team of researchers have shown that scene cuts have an impact on the management of viewer attention. In this study, the researchers set out to find out how this impact differs among media professionals. The experience gained over the years of producing and working with multimedia content has a long-term impact on the way professionals deal with such content. As society produces and consumes more and more of these types of content, there is an interest in discovering the effects of visual perception of such content on brain activity.

Doctor Celia Andreu-Sánchez, chief researcher of this study and member of the Neuro-Com group of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​considers that the results may be of interest for neuroscience, given that “knowing that to pass many hours with media works like a professional affects not only visual perception, but also brain rhythms like mu rhythm, is undoubtedly of great interest to science. These findings present neuroscience with a very important working tool : Audiovisual. We know that working and consuming this content professionally affects the behavior of the brain, so it seems plausible that the design of consumption strategies for videos may be relevant in several areas of neuroscience research “.

Doctor Miguel Ángel Martín-Pascual, from the Instituto Radio Televisión Española and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​also author of this research published in Frontiers in systems neuroscience, considers these results to be of the utmost importance in the field of professional audiovisual production.

Knowing the impact of the professionalization of the audiovisual sector on its professionals is of vital importance for the development of long-term strategies related to the occupational health of this group “.

Miguel Ángel Martín-Pascual, Instituto Radio Televisión Española and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

José María Delgado, researcher in the Division of Neuroscience at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, points out that “this study and others like it carried out by our two groups highlight the enormous amount of unconscious processing that takes place in the brain (in particular in the professional group) when viewing videos and movies, especially when the material is edited to contain very short scenes. However, in some way this unconscious processing can have an effect, for example, on our emotional state: although we do not fully perceive all the shots in the video show aggressive interactions, we can detect them from an emotional point of view. “

This study was developed by the Neuro-Com research group of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​the Instituto Radio Televisión Española and the Division of Neurosciences of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville. It was carried out within the framework of public subsidies from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Regional Government of Andalusia.