An fMRI dataset in response to “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, a socially-rich, naturalistic movie

Abstract

Naturalistic stimuli evoke strong, consistent, and information-rich patterns of brain activity, and engage large extents of the human brain. They allow researchers to compare highly similar brain responses across subjects, and to study how complex representations are encoded in brain activity. Here, we describe and share a dataset where 25 subjects watched part of the feature film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” by Wes Anderson. The movie has a large cast with many famous actors. Throughout the story, the camera shots highlight faces and expressions, which are fundamental to understand the complex narrative of the movie. This movie was chosen to sample brain activity specifically related to social interactions and face processing. This dataset provides researchers with fMRI data that can be used to explore social cognitive processes and face processing, adding to the existing neuroimaging datasets that sample brain activity with naturalistic movies.

Hybrid Hyperalignment: A single high-dimensional model of shared information embedded in cortical patterns of response and functional connectivity

“…All participants gave written, informed consent, and all studies were approved by the Institutional Review Board of Dartmouth College. In data set one (Budapest), we scanned 21 participants (11 female, 27.29 years ± 2.35 SD) as they watched the second half of the film The Grand Budapest Hotel (Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Chauhan, et al, 2020). This dataset had 25 total participants, but we used a subset of 21 participants with headcases for this analysis.…”

“…They viewed the first portion of the movie outside of the scanner and the second portion (final 50.9 minutes) in the scanner as we collected fMRI data. This second portion of the film was broken into 5 separate runs, each approximately 10 minutes long, with a short break between each run (Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Chauhan, et al, 2020) . In the Raiders data set, fMRI responses were measured while participants watched the second half of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark (approximately 57 minutes) over 4 runs, each roughly 15 minutes.…”

“…The Grand Budapest Hotel data are publicly available on Scientific Data (Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Chauhan, et al, 2020). The Raiders of the Lost Ark and Whiplash data will be made available at time of publication.…”

“…We tested these two possibilities using fMRI data collected while participants watched one of three movies: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Chauhan, et al, 2020) ,…”

“…We tested these two possibilities using fMRI data collected while participants watched one of three movies: The Grand Budapest Hotel (Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Chauhan, et al, 2020), Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Whiplash . We found that a single common model computed using both response and functional connectivity information aligned neural response and connectivity patterns across participants as well as or better than RHA or CHA alone, supporting the second hypothesis of a single, optimal shared-information space.…”