The examination of functional connectivity in fMRI data collected during task-free “rest” has provided a powerful tool for studying functional brain organization. Limitations of this approach include susceptibility to head motion artifacts and participant drowsiness or sleep. These issues are especially relevant when studying young children or clinical populations. Here we introduce a movie paradigm, Inscapes, that features abstract shapes without a narrative or scene-cuts. The movie was designed to provide enough stimulation to improve compliance related to motion and wakefulness while minimizing cognitive load during the collection of functional imaging data. We compare Inscapes to eyes-open rest and to age-appropriate movie clips in healthy adults (Ocean's Eleven, n = 22) and a pilot sample of typically developing children ages 3-7 (Fantasia, n = 13). Head motion was significantly lower during both movies relative to rest for both groups. In adults, movies decreased the number of participants who self-reported sleep. Intersubject correlations, used to quantify synchronized, task-evoked activity across movie and rest conditions in adults, involved less cortex during Inscapes than Ocean's Eleven. To evaluate the effect of movie-watching on intrinsic functional connectivity networks, we examined mean functional connectivity using both whole-brain functional parcellation and network-based approaches. Both inter- and intra-network metrics were more similar between Inscapes and Rest than between Ocean's Eleven and Rest, particularly in comparisons involving the default network. When comparing movies to Rest, the mean functional connectivity of somatomotor, visual and ventral attention networks differed significantly across various analyses. We conclude that low-demand movies like Inscapes may represent a useful intermediate condition between task-free rest and typical narrative movies while still improving participant compliance. Inscapes is publicly available for download at headspacestudios.org/inscapes.

Following intranasal administration of oxytocin (OT), we measured, via functional MRI, changes in brain activity during judgments of socially (Eyes) and nonsocially (Vehicles) meaningful pictures in 17 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). OT increased activity in the striatum, the middle frontal gyrus, the medial prefrontal cortex, the right orbitofrontal cortex, and the left superior temporal sulcus. In the striatum, nucleus accumbens, left posterior superior temporal sulcus, and left premotor cortex, OT increased activity during social judgments and decreased activity during nonsocial judgments. Changes in salivary OT concentrations from baseline to 30 min postadministration were positively associated with increased activity in the right amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex during social vs. nonsocial judgments. OT may thus selectively have an impact on salience and hedonic evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli in children with ASD, and thereby facilitate social attunement. These findings further the development of a neurophysiological systems-level understanding of mechanisms by which OT may enhance social functioning in children with ASD.A utism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common, early-onset neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by devastating difficulties in social interaction, communication, and repetitive or restricted interests and behaviors. ASD displays great phenotypic heterogeneity and etiological diversity, but its original characterization, social dysfunction, has been its hallmark and unifying feature (1). There is no established pharmacological treatment for social impairment in ASD.When given acutely, intranasal oxytocin (OT) leads to enhanced processing of social stimuli in typically developing adults, as evidenced by increased eye contact, in-group trust, and emotion recognition from facial expressions (2-4). At the level of neural systems, intranasal OT heightens activity in a set of neuroanatomical structures involved in processing socially meaningful stimuli in typically developing adults (5, 6). Recently, the first brain imaging study in adults with ASD examined the effects of OT administration and identified increased activation in the right amygdala during social information processing (7).Behavioral studies demonstrate that in children and adults with ASD, a single administration of intranasal OT leads to increased willingness to interact socially (8), better comprehension of affective speech (9), reduced repetitive behaviors (10), increased understanding of others' mental states (11), and improved social cognition (12). Despite cautionary calls regarding the use of OT in children to treat ASD before understanding the neural mechanisms underlying OT's complex impact on behavior (13), there have been no studies on the effects of OT administration on brain activity in children. Furthermore, although there are several large-scale clinical trials currently underway (www. clinicaltrials.gov) to examine the effects of chronically administered OT in ASD, the e...

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C-tactile (CT) afferents encode caress-like touch that supports social-emotional development, and stimulation of the CT system engages the insula and cortical circuitry involved in social-emotional processing. Very few neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of touch processing in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who often exhibit atypical responses to touch. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we evaluated the hypothesis that children and adolescents with ASD would exhibit atypical brain responses to CT-targeted touch. Children and adolescents with ASD, relative to typically developing (TD) participants, exhibited reduced activity in response to CT-targeted (arm) versus non-CT-targeted (palm) touch in a network of brain regions known to be involved in social-emotional information processing including bilateral insula and insular operculum, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, bilateral temporoparietal junction extending into the inferior parietal lobule, right fusiform gyrus, right amygdala, and bilateral ventrolateral prefrontal cortex including the inferior frontal and precentral gyri, suggesting atypical social brain hypoactivation. Individuals with ASD (vs. TD) showed an enhanced response to non-CT-targeted versus CT-targeted touch in the primary somatosensory cortex, suggesting atypical sensory cortical hyper-reactivity.

Naturalistic viewing paradigms such as movies have been shown to reduce participant head motion and improve arousal during fMRI scanning relative to task-free rest, and have been used to study both functional connectivity and stimulus-evoked BOLD-signal changes. These task-based hemodynamic changes are synchronized across subjects and involve large areas of the cortex, and it is unclear whether individual differences in functional connectivity are enhanced or diminished under such naturalistic conditions. This work first aims to characterize variability in BOLD-signal based functional connectivity (FC) across 2 distinct movie conditions and eyes-open rest (n=31 healthy adults, 2 scan sessions each). We found that movies have higher within- and between-subject correlations in cluster-wise FC relative to rest. The anatomical distribution of inter-individual variability was similar across conditions, with higher variability occurring at the lateral prefrontal lobes and temporoparietal junctions. Second, we used an unsupervised test-retest matching algorithm that identifies individual subjects from within a group based on FC patterns, quantifying the accuracy of the algorithm across the three conditions. The movies and resting state all enabled identification of individual subjects based on FC matrices, with accuracies between 61% and 100%. Overall, pairings involving movies outperformed rest, and the social, faster-paced movie attained 100% accuracy. When the parcellation resolution, scan duration, and number of edges used were increased, accuracies improved across conditions, and the pattern of movies>rest was preserved. These results suggest that using dynamic stimuli such as movies enhances the detection of FC patterns that are unique at the individual level.