Cross-movie prediction of individualized functional topography

Abstract

Participant-specific, functionally-defined brain areas are usually mapped with functional localizers and estimated by making contrasts between responses to single categories of input. Naturalistic stimuli engage multiple brain systems in parallel, provide more ecologically plausible estimates of real-world statistics, and are friendly to special populations. The current study shows that cortical functional topographies in individual participants can be estimated with high fidelity from naturalistic stimuli. Importantly, we demonstrate that robust, individualized estimates can be obtained even when participants watched different movies, were scanned with different parameters/scanners, and were sampled from different institutes across the world. Our results create a foundation for future studies that allow researchers to estimate a broad range of functional topographies based on naturalistic movies and a normative database, making it possible to integrate high-level cognitive functions across datasets from laboratories worldwide.

Dissociation of reliability, heritability, and predictivity in coarse- and fine-scale functional connectomes during development

“…While computing connectivity profiles to be hyperaligned, it is often desirable to use individualized connectivity targets to account for topographic idiosyncrasies in target regions. Individualized connectivity targets can be generated with individualized parcellations (Glasser et al, 2016;Langen et al, 2018;Kong et al, 2019Kong et al, , 2021Kong et al, , 2023Anderson et al, 2021) or by iterating the hyperalignment algorithm (Busch et al, 2021;Jiahui et al, 2023). In our implementation for this study, we used parcels from the Glasser cortical parcellation (Glasser et al, 2016) as the cortical fields and targets to be hyperaligned.…”