The One Where They Brain-Tune for Social Cognition: Multi-Modal Brain-Tuning on Friends
This work addresses social cognition enhancement for neuroscience and AI applications, but it is incremental as it extends an existing approach to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of enhancing social cognition by extending brain-tuning to a multimodal audio-video model, resulting in significant increases in brain alignment to the STS and adjacent ROI and improvements in sarcasm detection in sitcoms.
Recent studies on audio models show brain-tuning - fine-tuning models to better predict corresponding fMRI activity - improves brain alignment and increases performance on downstream semantic and audio tasks. We extend this approach to a multimodal audio-video model to enhance social cognition, targeting the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS), a key region for social processing, while subjects watch Friends. We find significant increases in brain alignment to the STS and an adjacent ROI, as well as improvements to a social cognition task related to the training data - sarcasm detection in sitcoms. In summary, our study extends brain-tuning to the multi-modal domain, demonstrating improvements to a downstream task after tuning to a relevant functional region.