Resolving individual differences in naturalistic neuroimaging

COEX 

Recent years have seen a rise in “naturalistic neuroimaging,” in which researchers scan participants viewing multimodal narrative stimuli—such as movies—to understand attention, memory, and emotion in dynamic contexts. While these studies have extended our understanding of how brain organization supports complex cognitive phenomena, they have also presented new challenges. In particular, these task paradigms make it especially difficult to disentangle individual differences in processing naturalistic stimuli from inter-individual variability in brain functional organization. In this talk, I will present new and emerging methods for comparing evoked brain activity across participants engaged in naturalistic tasks. In particular, I will focus on our work exploring methods for aligning participants in a high-dimensional functional space, highlighting how these functional alignment methods recover individual variability that is typically discarded as noise in group-level analyses. I will also introduce work extending these ideas with a state-space modeling approach, motivated by better capturing individual-specific variance in segmenting continuous audio-visual stimuli into discrete events.