Familiarity synchronizes brain rhythms during natural viewing

Familiarity with Game of Thrones selectively enhances intersubject synchrony in beta and gamma brain rhythms during naturalistic viewing, reflected in visual and default mode regions.

• Why it matters: Prior experience can shape perception, but it remains unclear how familiarity changes coordination of neural representations across distributed brain networks.
• What they did: Participants familiar or unfamiliar with the series watched clips while EEG or fMRI was recorded; intersubject correlations across EEG frequency bands were computed and related to fMRI BOLD responses.
• The result: Across participants, brain rhythms showed reliable intersubject synchrony linked to large-scale networks, and familiarity increased synchronisation in beta and gamma, with movie-driven modulation aligning across these bands.