title: Influences of High-Level Features, Gaze, and Scene Transitions on the Reliability of BOLD Responses to Natural Movie Stimuli.
abstract: Complex, sustained, dynamic, and naturalistic visual stimulation can evoke distributed brain activities that are highly reproducible within and across individuals. However, the precise origins of such reproducible responses remain incompletely understood. Here, we employed concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and eye tracking to investigate the experimental and behavioral factors that influence fMRI activity and its intra- and inter-subject reproducibility during repeated movie stimuli. We found that widely distributed and highly reproducible fMRI responses were attributed primarily to the high-level natural content in the movie. In the absence of such natural content, low-level visual features alone in a spatiotemporally scrambled control stimulus evoked significantly reduced degree and extent of reproducible responses, which were mostly confined to the primary visual cortex (V1). We also found that the varying gaze behavior affected the cortical response at the peripheral part of V1 and in the oculomotor network, with minor effects on the response reproducibility over the extrastriate visual areas. Lastly, scene transitions in the movie stimulus due to film editing partly caused the reproducible fMRI responses at widespread cortical areas, especially along the ventral visual pathway. Therefore, the naturalistic nature of a movie stimulus is necessary for driving highly reliable visual activations. In a movie-stimulation paradigm, scene transitions and individuals' gaze behavior should be taken as potential confounding factors in order to properly interpret cortical activity that supports natural vision.
authors: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.|Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
authors: Kun-Han
authors: KH
authors: Lu
authors: Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
authors: Shao-Chin
authors: SC
authors: Hung
authors: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.|Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
authors: Haiguang
authors: H
authors: Wen
authors: Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.|Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
authors: Lauren
authors: L
authors: Marussich
authors: Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.|School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.|Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States of America.
authors: Zhongming
authors: Z
authors: Liu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012044:Regression Analysis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014785:Vision, Ocular; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways; D055815:Young Adult