Suspenseful movies shed light on aging and memory

As horror enthusiasts queue up their favorite Alfred Hitchcock films to welcome in the Halloween season, Brock University researchers have turned to the master of suspense for a different reason—to better understand how aging brains process events and form memories.

The Campbell Neurocognitive Aging Lab has been showing participants aged 18 to 88 a classic episode of the anthology television series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The short film, titled “Bang! You’re Dead,” portrays a small child swapping out his toy gun for a loaded weapon.

Professor of Psychology Karen Campbell, also the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging and director of the lab, says showing the short film rather than relying on standard cognitive tasks has benefits because the brain responds to “naturalistic stimuli” differently.

“Our day-to-day life is made up of a sequence of events that is continuous in nature, but it’s hard to measure brain activity while you move around in the world,” she says. “Recording brain activity in the lab while someone watches a film creates an experience closer to everyday life.”

Campbell, who has used the short film since her post-doctoral work at Cambridge University, and her team published two papers looking at age differences in brain activity during a screening.

In “Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing,” led by postdoctoral fellow Selma Lugtmeijer and published in Communications Biology, the researchers explored how the brain represents complex events and whether age affects how those representations are formed.

They found that the brain moves through a series of neural states—stable patterns of brain activity maintained over time—that change with each key event in the film. In older adults, however, these states last longer before transitioning, and the change between states is less pronounced.

Campbell says it was exciting to confirm the age-related lengthening of neural states, though there are pros and cons. On one hand, lengthened neural states allow for more context as older adults process events, but they may also lead to confusion about when some things happened in the sequence.

The second study, “Neural state changes during movie watching relate to episodic memory in younger and older adults,” was published in Cerebral Cortex. Sarah Henderson (BSc ’18, MA ’20, Ph.D. ’25), lead author on the study, traveled to the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in the Netherlands for research.

Working with Associate Professor Linda Geerlings of Radboud Universiteit, Henderson showed participants a shortened version of “Bang! You’re Dead” while measuring brain activity using EEG, then conducted recall tests to see how memory was affected.

Campbell says using the same film in this study meant the researchers could link up age differences in neural states with memory recall, something the lab had not tried before.

“With this test of memory, we could relate the degree of change between successive neural states to how well the events were recalled,” she says. “And we saw that when there was a bigger change, it was related to better memory.”

Campbell says the relationship between bigger changes in neural states and better memory of the film held up across participants of all ages, which she notes could be the key for improving memory in those who are struggling.

“For instance, highlighting changes between scenes—like pointing out that the boy has left the house with a loaded gun—may help make neural states more distinct and improve memory,” she says.

Campbell now plans to use these findings in the development of an intervention aimed at improving event memory in older adults who are exhibiting the first signs of dementia.