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

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.

Automated summary

Recently, the movie-watching fMRI method has been used to explore brain working patterns. Researchers used sliding time windows technique and inter-Subject functional correlation (ISFC) analysis to find significant group differences in brain responses and functional connectivity between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical development (TD) subjects. In movie events involving character emotions, the ASD group showed lower inter-Subject correlation (ISC) and decreased functional connectivity between large scale networks compared to TD. In movie events focusing on objects and scenes, the ASD group displayed strong synchronous response in the dorsal and ventral attentional networks, and increased functional connectivity between the frontoparietal network (FPN) and dorsal attention network (DAN), FPN and sensorimotor network (SMN) compared to TD.