Lived Experience in the “Naturalistic” Paradigm: Implementing Empirical Phenomenology with Expert Participants for Neurocinematics

When studying subjective reports in neuroscience, data that are more easily quantifiable understandably hold more appeal due to the methodological complexities involved with in-depth approaches (second-person interview techniques and analyses) that require extended training of a researcher but also epistemological regard for the problem. A methodological direction for neurocinematics that could better capture the complexities inherent in the experience of film-viewing is to treat distinct domains of the neurocinematic phenomenon, the film stimuli, related subjective accounts, and their neural correlates as co-constitutive in the data analysis. The present proposal outlines an empirical phenomenology approach in the naturalistic paradigm with film stimuli building on the neurophenomenological ideas of pragmatically approaching the relationship between neurocognitive processes and phenomenological accounts. Using the micro-phenomenological method as a guide, i.e. non-naïve introspection (“becoming aware”) with a trained interviewer, the objective is to emphasize the process of accessing lived experiences for systematic second-person investigations. Such in-depth subjective reports have the potential to yield fine-grained descriptions of the participants’ experience related to (free) viewing of films as opposed to relying on naïve introspections (“just ask”) or easily quantifiable assessments that lack complexity (“just look”) and are prone to bias due to the simplification of experience. Building up a case for empirical phenomenology through the methodological demands of its framework, the illustration of the micro-phenomenological method serves to underscore the non-trivial nature of accessing and reporting experience and its role in the neurocognitive domain.