Movie Events Detecting Reveals Inter-Subject Synchrony Difference of Functional Brain Activity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Recently, movie-watching fMRI has been recognized as a novel method to explore brain working patterns. Previous researchers correlated natural stimuli with brain responses to explore brain functional specialization by “reverse correlation” methods, which were based on within-group analysis. However, what external stimuli drove significantly different brain responses in two groups of different subjects were still unknown. To address this, sliding time windows technique combined with inter-Subject functional correlation (ISFC) was proposed to detect movie events with significant group differences between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical development (TD) subjects. Then, using inter-Subject correlation (ISC) and ISFC analysis, we found that in three movie events involving character emotions, the ASD group showed significantly lower ISC in the middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, cerebellum, caudate, precuneus, and showed decreased functional connectivity between large scale networks than that in TD. Under the movie event focusing on objects and scenes shot, the dorsal and ventral attentional networks of ASD had a strong synchronous response. Meanwhile, ASD also displayed increased functional connectivity between the frontoparietal network (FPN) and dorsal attention network (DAN), FPN, and sensorimotor network (SMN) than TD. ASD has its own unique synchronous response rather than being “unresponsive” in natural movie-watching. Our findings provide a new method and valuable insight for exploring the inconsistency of the brain “tick collectively” to same natural stimuli. This analytic approach has the potential to explore pathological mechanisms and promote training methods of ASD.

Preserved spontaneous mentalizing amid reduced intersubject variability in autism during a movie narrative

“…It is worth noting that our intersubject correlation patterns differ from previous studies demonstrating greater brain response variability in autistic individuals compared to neurotypicals (Byrge et al, 2015; Hahamy et al, 2015; Hasson et al, 2009; Lyons et al, 2020; Nunes et al, 2019; Ou et al, 2022; Pegado et al, 2020; Salmi et al, 2013). Several factors could explain these discrepancies.…”

Inter-subject correlations of EEG reflect subjective arousal and acoustic features of music

“…ISC analysis is a method of collectively analyzing shared brain activity, which can be used to quantify the degree to which a subject’s brain activity is similar to that of other subjects ( Hasson et al, 2004 ; Simony et al, 2016 ). Previous studies on ISCs to natural stimuli used audiovisual stimuli such as film ( Hasson et al, 2008 ; Kauppi et al, 2010 ; Dmochowski et al, 2012 ; Tu et al, 2019 ; Bolton et al, 2020 ; Gruskin et al, 2020 ; Patel et al, 2021 ; Ou et al, 2022 ), television/video ( Cantlon and Li, 2013 ; Schmälzle et al, 2013 ; Chen and Farivar, 2020 ; Kotila et al, 2021 ), stories ( Wilson et al, 2008 ; Finn et al, 2018 ; Lerner et al, 2018 ; Cohen et al, 2022 ), speech ( Schmälzle et al, 2015 ), and audio ( Kandeepan et al, 2020 ; Thiede et al, 2020 ).…”