Regional activity and interregional functional connectivity uniquely contribute to social cognitive judgments during movie-watching

Abstract Understanding how the brain gives rise to social cognition has been a key goal of neuroimaging research. Both changes in regional activation as well as functional connectivity have been implicated as potential mechanisms underlying social cognition, but the two have rarely been examined concurrently. Moreover, because the neural processes underlying social cognition are dynamic, developing approaches to capture dynamic changes in regional activity and functional connectivity are critical. Here, we describe a novel analysis approach that captures both regional activity and dynamic functional connectivity simultaneously during a naturalistic, socially focused movie-watching task. We found that both regional activation and functional connectivity were uniquely related to awkwardness, a judgment associated with social faux pas detection and theory of mind. Regional activation within sensorimotor networks was positively associated with awkwardness, whereas activation in the default network was negatively associated. Models including functional connectivity accounted for unique variance beyond models with activity alone. Specifically, dynamic functional connectivity between networks, primarily the frontoparietal control network, was positively associated with awkwardness. Together, these findings suggest that both dynamic regional brain activity and functional connectivity each uniquely contribute to complex and dynamic social judgments.