Abstract
Movie fMRI has been increasingly used in investigations of human brain function. Inter-subject functional correlation (ISFC), which evaluates stimulus-dependent inter-regional synchrony between brains exposed to the same stimulus, is emerging as an influencing measure for movie fMRI data analyses. Before the wide application of ISFC analyses, it will be useful to investigate the degree to which they are similar and different across different movies. Based on the four movie fMRI runs of 178 subjects included in the “human connectome project (HCP) S1200 Release”, we evaluated ISFCs throughout the brain and analyzed their consistency across different movies using intra-class correlation (ICC). We also investigated the generalizability of ISFC-based predictive models, which is closely related to their consistency, with sex classification and grip strength prediction used as test cases. The results showed that the intensity of ISFCs was generally weak (0.047). Except a few within-network ones (e.g., ICC of ISFC in the PON was 0.402), ISFCs throughout the brain exhibited low consistency, as indicated by a mean ICC of 0.130. The accuracies for inter-run predictions (60.7-72.8% for sex classification, and R = 0.122–0.275 for grip strength prediction) were much lower than those for intra-run predictions (73.2-83.0% for sex classification, and R = 0.325–0.403 for grip strength prediction), and this indicates poor generalizability of predictive models based on ISFCs. According to these findings, ISFC analyses capture aspects of brain function that are specific to each individual movie, and this specificity should be taken into account (in some cases might be especially useful) in future naturalistic studies.
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Data availability
Original data used in this study is available at the HCP website (https://db.humanconnectome.org/).
Code availability
Code used to perform the analyses and ISFC matrices are available for download from https://github.com/tianbjtu/ISFC.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for their significant and constructive comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the paper. Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 62276021, 61773048).
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M.Y. and L.T. designed research; M.Y. and L.T. performed research; M.Y., J. L and L.T. analyzed data; M.Y., Y.G., H.M., J. L and L.T. wrote the paper.
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Ye, M., Liu, J., Guan, Y. et al. Are inter-subject functional correlations consistent across different movies?. Brain Imaging and Behavior 17, 44–53 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00740-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00740-8