Abstract
Cinema is a promising naturalistic stimulus that enables, for instance, elicitation of robust emotions during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Inter-subject correlation (ISC) has been used as a model-free analysis method to map the highly complex hemodynamic responses that are evoked during watching a movie. Here, we extended the ISC analysis to frequency domain using wavelet analysis combined with non-parametric permutation methods for making voxel-wise statistical inferences about frequency-band specific ISC. We applied these novel analysis methods to a dataset collected in our previous study where 12 subjects watched an emotionally engaging movie “Crash” during fMRI scanning. Our results suggest that several regions within the frontal and temporal lobes show ISC predominantly at low frequency bands, whereas visual cortical areas exhibit ISC also at higher frequencies. It is possible that these findings relate to recent observations of a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, or that the types of events processed in temporal and prefrontal cortical areas (e.g., social interactions) occur over longer time periods than the stimulus features processed in the visual areas. Software tools to perform frequency-specific ISC analysis, together with a visualization application, are available as open source Matlab code.
Highlights
Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis (Hasson et al, 2004) is a model-free approach to examine the highly complex functional magnetic resonance imaging data acquired in natural, context-dependent, audiovisual stimulus environments, such as during watching movies
ISC was present across all frequency bands
Software tools to perform frequency-specific Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis, together with the visualization software, are made available as open source Matlab code at Supplementary Material
Summary
Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis (Hasson et al, 2004) is a model-free approach to examine the highly complex functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired in natural, context-dependent, audiovisual stimulus environments, such as during watching movies. We first showed volunteers a major part of the movie “Crash” (directed by Paul Haggis, Lions Gate films, 2005) outside of the fMRI scanner to provide them with the full context of the plot and to get them emotionally involved prior to showing them the last 36 min during fMRI scanning (Jääskeläinen et al, 2008). In this setting, we observed significant frontal-cortical ISCs between pairs of subjects. Prefrontal cortical ISC was recently observed when subjects watched a television episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Bang! You’re Dead, 1961, directed by Alfred Hitchcock) (Hasson et al, 2008b)
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