Elucidating relations between fMRI, ECoG, and EEG through a common natural stimulus

Abstract

Human brain mapping relies heavily on fMRI, ECoG and EEG, which capture different physiological signals. Relationships between these signals have been established in the context of specific tasks or during resting state, often using spatially confined concurrent recordings in animals. But it is not certain whether these correlations generalize to other contexts relevant for human cognitive neuroscience. Here, we address the case of complex naturalistic stimuli and ask two basic questions. First, how reliable are the responses evoked by a naturalistic audio-visual stimulus in each of these imaging methods, and second, how similar are stimulus-related responses across methods? To this end, we investigated a wide range of brain regions and frequency bands. We presented the same movie clip twice to three different cohorts of subjects (N = 45, N = 11, N = 5) and assessed stimulus-driven correlations across viewings and between imaging methods, thereby ruling out task-irrelevant confounds. All three imaging methods had similar repeat-reliability across viewings when fMRI and EEG data were averaged across subjects, highlighting the potential to achieve large signal-to-noise ratio by leveraging large sample sizes. The fMRI signal correlated positively with high-frequency ECoG power across multiple task-related cortical structures but positively with low-frequency EEG and ECoG power. In contrast to previous studies, these correlations were as strong for low-frequency as for high frequency ECoG. We also observed links between fMRI and infra-slow EEG voltage fluctuations. These results extend previous findings to the case of natural stimulus processing.

Spectrally resolved EEG intersubject correlation reveals distinct cortical oscillatory patterns during free‐viewing of affective scenes

“…The first result of this study is that for each of the three bands considered there is a large degree of ISC in response to a naturalistic stimulus, irrespective of its emotional content. This finding mirrors evidences from fMRI studies that showed that ISC involves, although with a varying strength, all of the cortical surface (Chang et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2016;Hasson et al, 2004), and replicates the evidence that watching a movie prompts a strong ISC also in the electrical activity collected on the scalp (Haufe et al, 2018). The analysis showed different ISC topographies for the three bands considered, with a gradient of reducing topographical spread of the ISC, transitioning from slow to fast activity.…”

M/EEG analysis of naturalistic stories: a review from speech to language processing

“…Combining analysis of methods spanning the range of space and time will show where the granularity of our linking hypotheses fail (cf. Haufe et al, 2018).…”

Measuring shared responses across subjects using intersubject correlation

“…In the simplest case, computing temporal ISCs across a movie or spoken narrative provides insights into the reliability of stimulus locked neural responses across subjects . However, by capitalizing on a shared naturalistic stimulus, ISC analyses can also be used to measure commonalities in stimulus-evoked processing across imaging modalities, such as fMRI, ECoG, EEG, and fNIRS (Mukamel et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2017;Haufe et al, 2018). In this context, ISCs reflect neural signals captured by both measurement modalities.…”

“…Band-pass filtering brain activity measurements to that frequency band can help zoom in on a function of interest. Multi-modal approaches combining fMRI with high-temporal-resolution technologies such as EEG and ECoG can provide insights as to what frequency bands contribute most to ISCs (Mukamel et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2017;Haufe et al, 2018).…”