Real-world events unfold at different time scales and, therefore, cognitive and neuronal processes must likewise occur at different time scales. We present a novel procedure that identifies brain regions responsive to sensory information accumulated over different time scales. We measured functional magnetic resonance imaging activity while observers viewed silent films presented forward, backward, or piecewise-scrambled in time. Early visual areas (e.g., primary visual cortex and the motion-sensitive area MTϩ) exhibited high response reliability regardless of disruptions in temporal structure. In contrast, the reliability of responses in several higher brain areas, including the superior temporal sulcus (STS), precuneus, posterior lateral sulcus (LS), temporal parietal junction (TPJ), and frontal eye field (FEF), was affected by information accumulated over longer time scales. These regions showed highly reproducible responses for repeated forward, but not for backward or piecewise-scrambled presentations. Moreover, these regions exhibited marked differences in temporal characteristics, with LS, TPJ, and FEF responses depending on information accumulated over longer durations (ϳ36 s) than STS and precuneus (ϳ12 s). We conclude that, similar to the known cortical hierarchy of spatial receptive fields, there is a hierarchy of progressively longer temporal receptive windows in the human brain.

This article describes a new method for assessing the effect of a given film on viewers' brain activity. Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during free viewing of films, and inter-subject correlation analysis (ISC) was used to assess similarities in the spatiotemporal responses across viewers' brains during movie watching. Our results demonstrate that some films can exert considerable control over brain activity and eye movements. However, this was not the case for all types of motion picture sequences, and the level of control over viewers' brain activity differed as a function of movie content, editing, and directing style. We propose that ISC may be useful to film studies by providing a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers' brains, and a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products. Finally, we suggest that this method brings together two separate and largely unrelated disciplines, cognitive neuroscience and film studies, and may open the way for a new interdisciplinary field of "neurocinematic" studies.

Scientific abstract Although widespread alterations in cortical structure have been documented in individuals with autism, the functional implications of these alterations remain to be determined. Here, we adopted a novel inter-subject (inter-SC) and intra-subject (intra-SC) correlation technique to quantify the reliability of the spatio-temporal responses of functional MR activity across the entire cortex in adults with autism during free-viewing of a popular audio-visual movie. Whereas these complex stimuli evoke highly reliable shared response time courses in typical individuals, cortical activity was more variable across individuals with autism (low inter-SC). Interestingly, when we measured the responses within an autistic individual across repeated presentations of the movie, we observed a unique, idiosyncratic response time course that was reliably replicated within each individual (high intra-SC). Encouragingly, after filtering out the idiosyncratic responses from each individual time course, we were able to uncover a more typical response profile, which resembles the shared responses seen in the typical subjects. These findings indicate that, under conditions approximating real-life situations, the neural activity of individuals with autism is characterized by individualistic responses that, although reliable within an autistic individual, are both highly variable across autistic individuals and different from the responses observed within the typical subjects. These idiosyncratic responses may underlie the atypical behaviors observed in autism. At the same time, we are encouraged by the presence of the more typical activation pattern lurking beneath these idiosyncratic fluctuations. Taken together, these findings may pave the way to future research aimed at characterizing the idiosyncratic response profiles, which, in turn, might contribute to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of the autism spectrum and its diagnosis.

Saccadic eye movements are responsible for bringing relevant parts of the visual field onto the fovea for detailed analysis. Because the retina is physiologically unable to deliver sharp images at very high transsaccadic speeds, the visual system minimizes the repercussion of the blurry images we would otherwise perceive during transsaccadic vision by reducing general visual sensitivity and increasing the detection threshold for visual stimuli. Ruling out a pure retinal origin, the effects of saccadic suppression can be already observed some 75 ms before the onset of a saccadic eye movement and are maximal at the onset of motion. The perception of a briefly presented stimulus immediately before the onset of any retinal motion is thus impaired despite the fact that this stimulus is projected onto the stationary retina and is, therefore, physically identical to that presented when no saccadic programming is in course. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging event-related study, we flashed Gabor patches at different times before the onset of a horizontal saccade and measured blood oxygen level-dependent responses at their encoding regions in primary visual cortex (V1) while subjects judged the relative orientation of the stimuli. Closely matching the significant reduction in behavioral performance, the amplitude of the responses in V1 consistently decreased as the stimuli were presented closer to the saccadic onset. These results demonstrate that the neural processes underlying saccade programming transiently modulate cortical responses to briefly presented visual stimuli in areas as early a V1, providing additional evidence for the existence of an active saccadic suppression mechanism in humans.