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1. An fMRI dataset in response to “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, a socially-rich, naturalistic movie

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00735-4  

   Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Matteo; Chauhan, Vassiki; Jiahui, Guo; Gobbini, M. Ida (December 2020, Scientific Data)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Naturalistic stimuli evoke strong, consistent, and information-rich patterns of brain activity, and engage large extents of the human brain. They allow researchers to compare highly similar brain responses across subjects, and to study how complex representations are encoded in brain activity. Here, we describe and share a dataset where 25 subjects watched part of the feature film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by Wes Anderson. The movie has a large cast with many famous actors. Throughout the story, the camera shots highlight faces and expressions, which are fundamental to understand the complex narrative of the movie. This movie was chosen to sample brain activity specifically related to social interactions and face processing. This dataset provides researchers with fMRI data that can be used to explore social cognitive processes and face processing, adding to the existing neuroimaging datasets that sample brain activity with naturalistic movies. 

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2. Naturalistic Audio-Movies reveal common spatial organization across “visual” cortices of different blind individuals

   https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac048  

   Musz, Elizabeth; Loiotile, Rita; Chen, Janice; Bedny, Marina (February 2022, Cerebral Cortex)

   Abstract Occipital cortices of different sighted people contain analogous maps of visual information (e.g. foveal vs. peripheral). In congenital blindness, “visual” cortices respond to nonvisual stimuli. Do visual cortices of different blind people represent common informational maps? We leverage naturalistic stimuli and inter-subject pattern similarity analysis to address this question. Blindfolded sighted (n = 22) and congenitally blind (n = 22) participants listened to 6 sound clips (5–7 min each): 3 auditory excerpts from movies; a naturalistic spoken narrative; and matched degraded auditory stimuli (Backwards Speech, scrambled sentences), during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. We compared the spatial activity patterns evoked by each unique 10-s segment of the different auditory excerpts across blind and sighted people. Segments of meaningful naturalistic stimuli produced distinctive activity patterns in frontotemporal networks that were shared across blind and across sighted individuals. In the blind group only, segment-specific, cross-subject patterns emerged in visual cortex, but only for meaningful naturalistic stimuli and not Backwards Speech. Spatial patterns of activity within visual cortices are sensitive to time-varying information in meaningful naturalistic auditory stimuli in a broadly similar manner across blind individuals. 

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3. The individualized neural tuning model: Precise and generalizable cartography of functional architecture in individual brains

   https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00032  

   Feilong, Ma; Nastase, Samuel A.; Jiahui, Guo; Halchenko, Yaroslav O.; Gobbini, M. Ida; Haxby, James V. (November 2023, Imaging Neuroscience)

   Abstract Quantifying how brain functional architecture differs from person to person is a key challenge in human neuroscience. Current individualized models of brain functional organization are based on brain regions and networks, limiting their use in studying fine-grained vertex-level differences. In this work, we present the individualized neural tuning (INT) model, a fine-grained individualized model of brain functional organization. The INT model is designed to have vertex-level granularity, to capture both representational and topographic differences, and to model stimulus-general neural tuning. Through a series of analyses, we demonstrate that (a) our INT model provides a reliable individualized measure of fine-grained brain functional organization, (b) it accurately predicts individualized brain response patterns to new stimuli, and (c) for many benchmarks, it requires only 10–20 minutes of data for good performance. The high reliability, specificity, precision, and generalizability of our INT model affords new opportunities for building brain-based biomarkers based on naturalistic neuroimaging paradigms. 

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4. Efficient estimation via envelope chain in magnetic resonance imaging‐based studies

   https://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.12522  

   Liu, Lan; Li, Wei; Su, Zhihua; Cook, Dennis; Vizioli, Luca; Yacoub, Essa (April 2021, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics)

   Abstract Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique that scans the anatomical structure of the brain, whereas functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses the same basic principles of atomic physics as MRI scans but image metabolic function. A major goal of MRI and fMRI study is to precisely delineate various types of tissues, anatomical structure, pathologies, and detect the brain regions that react to outer stimuli (e.g., viewing an image). As a key feature of these MRI‐based neuroimaging data, voxels (cubic pixels of the brain volume) are highly correlated. However, the associations between voxels are often overlooked in the statistical analysis. We adapt a recently proposed dimension reduction method called the envelope method to analyze neuoimaging data taking into account correlation among voxels. We refer to the modified procedure the envelope chain procedure. Because the envelope chain procedure has not been employed before, we demonstrate in simulations the empirical performance of estimator, and examine its sensitivity when our assumptions are violated. We use the estimator to analyze the MRI data from ADHD‐200 study. Data analyses demonstrate that leveraging the correlations among voxels can significantly increase the efficiency of the regression analysis, thus achieving higher detection power with small sample sizes. 

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5. In-degree centrality in a social network is linked to coordinated neural activity

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28432-3  

   Baek, Elisa C.; Hyon, Ryan; López, Karina; Finn, Emily S.; Porter, Mason A.; Parkinson, Carolyn (March 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Convergent processing of the world may be a factor that contributes to social connectedness. We use neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate the association between the social-network position (as measured by in-degree centrality) of first-year university students and their neural similarity while watching naturalistic audio-visual stimuli (specifically, videos). There were 119 students in the social-network study; 63 of them participated in the neuroimaging study. We show that more central individuals had similar neural responses to their peers and to each other in brain regions that are associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more variable responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings show that neural processing of external stimuli is similar in highly-central individuals but is idiosyncratic in less-central individuals. 

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