Using child‐friendly movie stimuli to study the development of face, place, and object regions from age 3 to 12 years

Abstract

Scanning young children while they watch short, engaging, commercially-produced movies has emerged as a promising approach for increasing data retention and quality. Movie stimuli also evoke a richer variety of cognitive processes than traditional experiments, allowing the study of multiple aspects of brain development simultaneously. However, because these stimuli are uncontrolled, it is unclear how effectively distinct profiles of brain activity can be distinguished from the resulting data.Here we develop an approach for identifying multiple distinct subject-specific Regions of Interest (ssROIs) using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing. We focused on the test case of higher-level visual regions selective for faces, scenes, and objects. Adults (N = 13) were scanned while viewing a 5.6-min child-friendly movie, as well as a traditional localizer experiment with blocks of faces, scenes, and objects.We found that just 2.7 min of movie data could identify subject-specific face, scene, and object regions. While successful, movie-defined ssROIS still showed weaker domain selectivity than traditional ssROIs. Having validated our approach in adults, we then used the same methods on movie data collected from 3 to 12-year-old children (N = 122). Movie response timecourses in 3-year-old children's face, scene, and object regions were already significantly and specifically predicted by timecourses from the corresponding regions in adults. We also found evidence of continued developmental change, particularly in the face-selective posterior superior temporal sulcus. Taken together, our results reveal both early maturity and functional change in face, scene, and object regions, and more broadly highlight the promise of short, child-friendly movies for developmental cognitive neuroscience.

An evaluation of how connectopic mapping reveals visual field maps in V1

“…However, connectivity from movie-watching may be more predictive of function in some brain regions including visual cortex 32 , 41 , and our results are consistent with this conclusion. Movie-watching may also offer other advantages such as improved reliability of connectivity estimates 39 , 42 , reproducibility of brain activity across participants and data acquisition sites 43 , and suitability for studying developmental populations 44 , 45 . Nevertheless, the gradients could still be accurately reconstructed from connectivity at rest, and there may be scenarios where resting-state data would be advantageous, for instance if studying visually impaired populations.…”

No evidence of theory of mind reasoning in the human language network

“…In an effort to clarify the relationship between the language and the ToM networks, we examine responses in the frontal and temporal language areas to the standard verbal ToM contrast (false belief stories > false photograph stories; Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; the same contrast as was used in Deen et al, 2015), but also to a non-verbal ToM contrast (mental events > physical interactions in a rich naturalistic stimulus-a fewminute-long Pixar film; Jacoby et al, 2016). Jacoby et al (2016) have previously shown that this nonverbal ToM contrast elicits a strong response in brain areas defined by the verbal ToM localizer (see also Richardson et al, 2018;Kamps et al, 2022).…”