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Overarching theories such as the interactive specialization and maturational frameworks have been proposed to describe human functional brain development. However, these frameworks have not yet been systematically examined across the fMRI literature. Visual processing is one of the most well-studied fields in neuroimaging, and research in this area has recently expanded to include naturalistic paradigms that facilitate study in younger age ranges, allowing for an in-depth critical appraisal of these frameworks across childhood. To this end, we conducted a scoping review of 94 developmental visual fMRI studies, including both traditional experimental task and naturalistic studies, across multiple sub-domains (early visual processing, category-specific higher order processing, naturalistic visual processing). We found that across domains, many studies reported progressive development, but few studies describe regressive or emergent changes necessary to fit the maturational or interactive specialization frameworks. Our findings suggest a need for the expansion of developmental frameworks and clearer reporting of both progressive and regressive changes, along with well-powered, longitudinal studies., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Population neuroscience datasets allow researchers to estimate reliable effect sizes for brain-behavior associations because of their large sample sizes. However, these datasets undergo strict quality control to mitigate sources of noise, such as head motion. This practice often excludes a disproportionate number of minoritized individuals. We employ motion-ordering and motion-ordering+resampling (bagging) to test if these methods preserve functional MRI (fMRI) data in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ( N = 5,733 ). Black and Hispanic youth exhibited excess head motion relative to data collected from White youth, and were discarded disproportionately when using conventional approaches. Both methods retained more than 99% of Black and Hispanic youth. They produced reproducible brain-behavior associations across low-/high-motion racial/ethnic groups based on motion-limited fMRI data. The motion-ordering and bagging methods are two feasible approaches that can enhance sample representation for testing brain-behavior associations and fulfill the promise of consortia datasets to produce generalizable effect sizes across diverse populations., Competing Interests: Competing Interests Statement D.A.F has a financial interest in Turing Medical Inc. and may benefit financially if the company is successful in marketing FIRMM motion monitoring software products. D.A.F may receive royalty income based on FIRMM technology developed at Washington University School of Medicine and Oregon Health and Sciences University and licensed to Turing Medical Inc. D.A.F is a co-founder of Turning Medical Inc. These potential conflicts of interest have been reviewed and are managed by Washington University School of Medicine, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and the University of Minnesota. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Introduction: Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance (CO-OP) is a cognitive-based, task-specific intervention recommended for children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). We recently showed structural and functional brain changes after CO-OP, including increased cerebellar grey matter. This study aimed to determine whether CO-OP intervention induced changes in cortical grey matter volume in children with DCD, and if these changes were associated with improvements in motor performance and movement quality., Methods: This study is part of a randomized waitlist-control trial (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02597751). Children with DCD ( N  = 78) were randomized to either a treatment or waitlist group and underwent three MRIs over 6 months. The treatment group received intervention (once weekly for 10 weeks) between the first and second scan; the waitlist group received intervention between the second and third scan. Cortical grey matter volume was measured using voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Behavioral outcome measures included the Performance Quality Rating Scale (PQRS) and Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency-2 (BOT-2). Of the 78 children, 58 were excluded (mostly due to insufficient data quality), leaving a final N  = 20 for analyses. Due to the small sample size, we combined both groups to examine treatment effects. Cortical grey matter volume differences were assessed using a repeated measures ANOVA, controlling for total intracranial volume. Regression analyses examined the relationship of grey matter volume changes to BOT-2 (motor performance) and PQRS (movement quality)., Results: After CO-OP, children had significantly decreased grey matter in the right superior frontal gyrus and middle/posterior cingulate gyri. We found no significant associations of grey matter volume changes with PQRS or BOT-2 scores., Conclusion: Decreased cortical grey matter volume generally reflects greater brain maturity. Decreases in grey matter volume after CO-OP intervention were in regions associated with self-regulation and motor control, consistent with our other studies. Decreased grey matter volume may be due to focal increases in synaptic pruning, perhaps as a result of strengthening networks in the brain via the repeated learning and actions in therapy. Findings from this study add to the growing body of literature demonstrating positive neuroplastic changes in the brain after CO-OP intervention., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Malik, Weber, Lang, Vanderwal and Zwicker.)

Introduction: The cause of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is unknown, but neuroimaging evidence suggests that DCD may be related to altered brain development. Children with DCD show less structural and functional connectivity compared to typically developing (TD) children, but few studies have examined cortical volume in children with DCD. The purpose of this study was to investigate cortical grey matter volume using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in children with DCD compared to TD children., Methods: This cross-sectional study was part of a larger randomized-controlled trial (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02597751) that involved various MRI scans of children with/without DCD. This paper focuses on the anatomical scans, performing VBM of cortical grey matter volume in 30 children with DCD and 12 TD children. Preprocessing and VBM data analysis were conducted using the Computational Anatomy Tool Box-12 and a study-specific brain template. Differences between DCD and TD groups were assessed using a one-way ANOVA, controlling for total intracranial volume. Regression analyses examined if motor and/or attentional difficulties predicted grey matter volume. We used threshold-free cluster enhancement (5,000 permutations) and set an alpha level of 0.05. Due to the small sample size, we did not correct for multiple comparisons., Results: Compared to the TD group, children with DCD had significantly greater grey matter in the left superior frontal gyrus. Lower motor scores (meaning greater impairment) were related to greater grey matter volume in left superior frontal gyrus, frontal pole, and right middle frontal gyrus. Greater grey matter volume was also significantly correlated with higher scores on the Conners 3 ADHD Index in the left superior frontal gyrus, superior parietal lobe, and precuneus. These results indicate that greater grey matter volume in these regions is associated with poorer motor and attentional skills., Discussion: Greater grey matter volume in the left superior frontal gyrus in children with DCD may be a result of delayed or absent healthy cortical thinning, potentially due to altered synaptic pruning as seen in other neurodevelopmental disorders. These findings provide further support for the hypothesis that DCD is related to altered brain development., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Malik, Weber, Lang, Vanderwal and Zwicker.)

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most prevalent and disabling illnesses worldwide. Treatment of MDD typically relies on trial-and-error to find an effective approach. Identifying early response-related biomarkers that predict response to antidepressants would help clinicians to decide, as early as possible, whether a particular treatment might be suitable for a given patient., Methods: Data were from the two-stage Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response for Clinical Care (EMBARC) trial. A whole-brain, voxel-wise, mixed-effects model was applied to identify early-treatment cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes as biomarkers of treatment response. We examined changes in CBF measured with arterial spin labeling 1-week after initiating double-masked sertraline/placebo. We tested whether these early 1-week scans could be used to predict response observed after 8-weeks of treatment., Results: Response to 8-week placebo treatment was associated with increased cerebral perfusion in temporal cortex and reduced cerebral perfusion in postcentral region captured at 1-week of treatment. Additionally, CBF response in these brain regions was significantly correlated with improvement in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score in the placebo group. No significant associations were found for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment., Conclusions: We conclude that early CBF responses to placebo administration in multiple brain regions represent candidate neural biomarkers of longer-term antidepressant effects.

Introduction: Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is effective in alleviating treatment-resistant depression (TRD). It has been proposed that regions within the left DLPFC that are anti-correlated with the right subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) may represent optimal individualized target sites for high-frequency left rTMS (HFL)., Objective/hypothesis: This study aimed to explore the effects of low-frequency right rTMS (LFR) on left sgACC connectivity during concurrent TMS-fMRI., Methods: 34 TRD patients underwent an imaging session that included both a resting-state fMRI run (rs-fMRI 0 ) and a run during which LFR was applied to the right DLPFC (TMS-fMRI). Participants subsequently completed four weeks of LFR treatment. The left sgACC functional connectivity was compared between the rs-fMRI 0 run and TMS-fMRI run. Personalized e-fields and a region-of-interest approach were used to calculate overlap of left sgACC functional connectivity at the TMS target and to assess for a relationship with treatment effects., Results: TMS-fMRI increased left sgACC functional connectivity to parietal regions within the ventral attention network; differences were not significantly associated with clinical improvements. Personalized e-fields were not significant in predicting treatment outcomes (p = 0.18)., Conclusion: This was the first study to examine left sgACC anti-correlation with the right DLPFC during an LFR rTMS protocol. In contrast to studies that targeted the left DLPFC, we did not find that higher anti-correlation was associated with clinical outcomes. Our results suggest that the antidepressant mechanism of action of LFR to the right DLPFC may be different than for HFL., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Understanding cortical topographic organization and how it supports complex perceptual and cognitive processes is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Previous work has characterized functional gradients that demonstrate large-scale principles of cortical organization. How these gradients are modulated by rich ecological stimuli remains unknown. Here, we utilize naturalistic stimuli via movie-fMRI to assess macroscale functional organization. We identify principal movie gradients that delineate separate hierarchies anchored in sensorimotor, visual, and auditory/language areas. At the opposite/heteromodal end of these perception-to-cognition axes, we find a more central role for the frontoparietal network along with the default network. Even across different movie stimuli, movie gradients demonstrated good reliability, suggesting that these hierarchies reflect a brain state common across different naturalistic conditions. The relative position of brain areas within movie gradients showed stronger and more numerous correlations with cognitive behavioral scores compared to resting state gradients. Together, these findings provide an ecologically valid representation of the principles underlying cortical organization while the brain is active and engaged in multimodal, dynamic perceptual and cognitive processing., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Head motion continues to be a major problem in fMRI research, particularly in developmental studies where an inverse relationship exists between head motion and age. Despite multifaceted and costly efforts to mitigate motion and motion-related signal artifact, few studies have characterized in-scanner head motion itself. This study leverages a large transdiagnostic public dataset (N = 1388, age 5-21y, The Healthy Brain Network Biobank) to characterize pediatric head motion in space, frequency, and time. We focus on practical aspects of head motion that could impact future study design, including comparing motion across groups (low, medium, and high movers), across conditions (movie-watching and rest), and between males and females. Analyses showed that in all conditions, high movers exhibited a different pattern of motion than low and medium movers that was dominated by x-rotation, and z- and y-translation. High motion spikes (>0.3mm) from all participants also showed this pitch-z-y pattern. Problematic head motion is thus composed of a single type of biomechanical motion, which we infer to be a nodding movement, providing a focused target for motion reduction strategies. A second type of motion was evident via spectral analysis of raw displacement data. This was observed in low and medium movers and was consistent with respiration rates. We consider this to be a baseline of motion best targeted in data preprocessing. Further, we found that males moved more than, but not differently from, females. Significant cross-condition differences in head motion were found. Movies had lower mean motion, and especially in high movers, movie-watching reduced within-run linear increases in head motion (i.e., temporal drift). Finally, we used intersubject correlations of framewise displacement (FD-ISCs) to assess for stimulus-correlated motion trends. Subject motion was more correlated in movie than rest, and 8 out of top 10 FD-ISC windows had FD below the mean. Possible reasons and future implications of these findings are discussed., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Background: Temporal fractals are characterized by prominent scale-invariance and self-similarity across time scales. Monofractal analysis quantifies this scaling behavior in a single parameter, the Hurst exponent (H). Higher H reflects greater correlation in the signal structure, which is taken as being more fractal. Previous fMRI studies have observed lower H during conventional tasks relative to resting state conditions, and shown that H is negatively correlated with task difficulty and novelty. To date, no study has investigated the fractal dynamics of BOLD signal during naturalistic conditions. Methods: We performed fractal analysis on Human Connectome Project 7T fMRI data (n = 72, 41 females, mean age 29.46 ± 3.76 years) to compare H across movie-watching and rest. Results: In contrast to previous work using conventional tasks, we found higher H values for movie relative to rest (mean difference = 0.014; p = 5.279 × 10 -7 ; 95% CI [0.009, 0.019]). H was significantly higher in movie than rest in the visual, somatomotor and dorsal attention networks, but was significantly lower during movie in the frontoparietal and default networks. We found no cross-condition differences in test-retest reliability of H. Finally, we found that H of movie-derived stimulus properties (e.g., luminance changes) were fractal whereas H of head motion estimates were non-fractal. Conclusions: Overall, our findings suggest that movie-watching induces fractal signal dynamics. In line with recent work characterizing connectivity-based brain state dynamics during movie-watching, we speculate that these fractal dynamics reflect the configuring and reconfiguring of brain states that occurs during naturalistic processing, and are markedly different than dynamics observed during conventional tasks., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Campbell, Vanderwal and Weber.)

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of multiple tasks and affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. We used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experience sampling. A Principal Component Analysis of the experience sampling data revealed four patterns of ongoing thought: episodic social cognition, unpleasant intrusive, concentration and self focus. Linear Mixed Modelling was used to conduct a series of exploratory analyses aimed at examining contextual distributions of these thought patterns. We found that different task contexts reliably evoke different thought patterns. Moreover, intrusive and negative thought pattern expression were influenced by individual affective style (depression level). The data establish the influence of task context and intrinsic features on ongoing thought, highlighting the importance of documenting how thought patterns emerge in cognitive tasks with different requirements., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Patterns of functional connectivity are unique at the individual level, enabling test-retest matching algorithms to identify a subject from among a group using only their functional connectome. Recent findings show that accuracies of these algorithms in children increase with age. Relatedly, the persistence of functional connectivity (FC) patterns across tasks and rest also increases with age. This study investigated the hypothesis that within-subject stability and between-subject similarity of the whole-brain pediatric connectome are developmentally relevant outcomes. Using data from 210 help-seeking children and adolescents, ages 6-21 years (Healthy Brain Network Biobank), we computed whole-brain FC matrices for each participant during two different movies (MovieDM and MovieTP) and two runs of task-free rest (all from a single scan session) and fed these matrices to a test-retest matching algorithm. We replicated the finding that matching accuracies for children and youth (ages 6-21 years) are low (18-44%), and that cross-state and cross-movie accuracies were the lowest. Results also showed that parcellation resolution and the number of volumes used in each matrix affect fingerprinting accuracies. Next, we calculated three measures of whole-connectome stability for each subject: cross-rest (Rest1-Rest2), cross-state (MovieDM-Rest1), and cross-movie (MovieDM-MovieTP), and three measures of within-state between-subject connectome similarity for Rest1, MovieDM, and MovieTP. We show that stability and similarity were correlated, but that these measures were not related to age. A principal component analysis of these measures yielded two components that we used to test for brain-behavior correlations with IQ, general psychopathology, and social skills measures (n = 119). The first component was significantly correlated with the social skills measure (r=-0.26, p = 0.005). Post hoc correlations showed that the social skills measure correlated with both cross-rest stability (r=-0.29, p = 0.001) and with connectome similarity during MovieDM (r=-0.28, p = 0.002). These findings suggest that the stability and similarity of the whole-brain connectome relate to the development of social skills. We infer that the maturation of the functional connectome simultaneously achieves patterns of FC that are distinct at the individual subject level, that are shared across individuals, and that are persistent across states and across runs-features which presumably combine to optimize neural processing during development. Future longitudinal work could reveal the developmental trajectories of stability and similarity of the connectome., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

As evidenced by the present special issue, movie fMRI is emerging as a powerful tool for exploring brain function and characterizing its variation across individuals. Here, we provide a brief perspective on the potential of movie fMRI for advancing the discovery of brain imaging-based markers of psychiatric illness. We discuss relevant gaps and opportunities in movie fMRI, and propose community-level models that might accelerate the pace of discovery of fMRI-based biomarkers in psychiatry., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have difficulties navigating dynamic everyday situations that contain multiple sensory inputs that need to either be attended to or ignored. As conventional experimental tasks lack this type of everyday complexity, we administered a film-based multi-talker condition with auditory distractors in the background. ADHD-related aberrant brain responses to this naturalistic stimulus were identified using intersubject correlations (ISCs) in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from 51 adults with ADHD and 29 healthy controls. A novel permutation-based approach introducing studentized statistics and subject-wise voxel-level null-distributions revealed that several areas in cerebral attention networks and sensory cortices were desynchronized in participants with ADHD (n = 20) relative to healthy controls (n = 20). Specifically, desynchronization of the posterior parietal cortex occurred when irrelevant speech or music was presented in the background, but not when irrelevant white noise was presented, or when there were no distractors. We also show regionally distinct ISC signatures for inattention and impulsivity. Finally, post-scan recall of the film contents was associated with stronger ISCs in the default-mode network for the ADHD and in the dorsal attention network for healthy controls. The present study shows that ISCs can further our understanding of how a complex environment influences brain states in ADHD., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are associated with complex changes as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. To date, neuroimaging-based models are not able to characterize individuals with sufficient sensitivity and specificity. Further, although evidence shows that ADHD traits occur in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, and autism spectrum disorder traits in individuals with ADHD, the neurofunctional basis of the overlap is undefined., Methods: Using individuals from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange and ADHD-200, we apply a data-driven, subject-level approach, connectome-based predictive modeling, to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data to identify brain-behavior associations that are predictive of symptom severity. We examine cross-diagnostic commonalities and differences., Results: Using leave-one-subject-out and split-half analyses, we define networks that predict Social Responsiveness Scale, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, and ADHD Rating Scale scores and confirm that these networks generalize to novel subjects. Networks share minimal overlap of edges (<2%) but some common regions of high hubness (Brodmann areas 10, 11, and 21, cerebellum, and thalamus). Further, predicted Social Responsiveness Scale scores for individuals with ADHD are linked to ADHD symptoms, supporting the hypothesis that brain organization relevant to autism spectrum disorder severity shares a component associated with attention in ADHD. Predictive connections and high-hubness regions are found within a wide range of brain areas and across conventional networks., Conclusions: An individual's functional connectivity profile contains information that supports dimensional, nonbinary classification in autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. Furthermore, we can determine disorder-specific and shared neurofunctional pathology using our method., (Copyright © 2019 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The use of movie-watching as an acquisition state for functional connectivity (FC) MRI has recently enabled multiple groups to obtain rich data sets in younger children with both substantial sample sizes and scan durations. Using naturalistic paradigms such as movies has also provided analytic flexibility for these developmental studies that extends beyond conventional resting state approaches. This review highlights the advantages and challenges of using movies for developmental neuroimaging and explores some of the methodological issues involved in designing pediatric studies with movies. Emerging themes from movie-watching studies are discussed, including an emphasis on intersubject correlations, developmental changes in network interactions under complex naturalistic conditions, and dynamic age-related changes in both sensory and higher-order network FC even in narrow age ranges. Converging evidence suggests an enhanced ability to identify brain-behavior correlations in children when using movie-watching data relative to both resting state and conventional tasks. Future directions and cautionary notes highlight the potential and the limitations of using movies to study FC in pediatric populations., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Humans have a striking ability to infer meaning from even the sparsest and most abstract forms of narratives. At the same time, flexibility in the form of a narrative is matched by inherent ambiguity in its interpretation. How does the brain represent subtle, idiosyncratic differences in the interpretation of abstract and ambiguous narratives? In this fMRI study, subjects were scanned either watching a novel 7-min animation depicting a complex narrative through the movement of geometric shapes, or listening to a narration of the animation's social story. Using an intersubject representational similarity analysis that compared interpretation similarity and neural similarity across subjects, we found that the more similar two people's interpretations of the abstract shapes animation were, the more similar were their neural responses in regions of the default mode network (DMN) and fronto-parietal network. Moreover, these shared responses were modality invariant: the shapes movie and the verbal interpretation of the movie elicited shared responses in linguistic areas and a subset of the DMN when subjects shared interpretations. Together, these results suggest a network of high-level regions that are not only sensitive to subtle individual differences in narrative interpretation during naturalistic conditions, but also resilient to large differences in the modality of the narrative., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Neural development is generally marked by an increase in the efficiency and diversity of neural processes. In a large sample ( n = 114) of human children and adults with ages ranging from 5 to 44 yr, we investigated the neural responses to naturalistic video stimuli. Videos from both real-life classroom settings and Hollywood feature films were used to probe different aspects of attention and engagement. For all stimuli, older ages were marked by more variable neural responses. Variability was assessed by the intersubject correlation of evoked electroencephalographic responses. Young males also had less-variable responses than young females. These results were replicated in an independent cohort ( n = 303). When interpreted in the context of neural maturation, we conclude that neural function becomes more variable with maturity, at least during the passive viewing of real-world stimuli., Competing Interests: Authors report no conflict of interest.

Naturalistic viewing paradigms such as movies have been shown to reduce participant head motion and improve arousal during fMRI scanning relative to task-free rest, and have been used to study both functional connectivity and stimulus-evoked BOLD-signal changes. These task-based hemodynamic changes are synchronized across subjects and involve large areas of the cortex, and it is unclear whether individual differences in functional connectivity are enhanced or diminished under such naturalistic conditions. This work first aims to characterize variability in BOLD-signal based functional connectivity (FC) across 2 distinct movie conditions and eyes-open rest (n=31 healthy adults, 2 scan sessions each). We found that movies have higher within- and between-subject correlations in cluster-wise FC relative to rest. The anatomical distribution of inter-individual variability was similar across conditions, with higher variability occurring at the lateral prefrontal lobes and temporoparietal junctions. Second, we used an unsupervised test-retest matching algorithm that identifies individual subjects from within a group based on FC patterns, quantifying the accuracy of the algorithm across the three conditions. The movies and resting state all enabled identification of individual subjects based on FC matrices, with accuracies between 61% and 100%. Overall, pairings involving movies outperformed rest, and the social, faster-paced movie attained 100% accuracy. When the parcellation resolution, scan duration, and number of edges used were increased, accuracies improved across conditions, and the pattern of movies>rest was preserved. These results suggest that using dynamic stimuli such as movies enhances the detection of FC patterns that are unique at the individual level., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Although typically measured during the resting state, a growing literature is illustrating the ability to map intrinsic connectivity with functional MRI during task and naturalistic viewing conditions. These paradigms are drawing excitement due to their greater tolerability in clinical and developing populations and because they enable a wider range of analyses (e.g., inter-subject correlations). To be clinically useful, the test-retest reliability of connectivity measured during these paradigms needs to be established. This resource provides data for evaluating test-retest reliability for full-brain connectivity patterns detected during each of four scan conditions that differ with respect to level of engagement (rest, abstract animations, movie clips, flanker task). Data are provided for 13 participants, each scanned in 12 sessions with 10 minutes for each scan of the four conditions. Diffusion kurtosis imaging data was also obtained at each session., Findings: Technical validation and demonstrative reliability analyses were carried out at the connection-level using the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient and at network-level representations of the data using the Image Intraclass Correlation Coefficient. Variation in intrinsic functional connectivity across sessions was generally found to be greater than that attributable to scan condition. Between-condition reliability was generally high, particularly for the frontoparietal and default networks. Between-session reliabilities obtained separately for the different scan conditions were comparable, though notably lower than between-condition reliabilities., Conclusions: This resource provides a test-bed for quantifying the reliability of connectivity indices across subjects, conditions and time. The resource can be used to compare and optimize different frameworks for measuring connectivity and data collection parameters such as scan length. Additionally, investigators can explore the unique perspectives of the brain's functional architecture offered by each of the scan conditions., (© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.)

The examination of functional connectivity in fMRI data collected during task-free "rest" has provided a powerful tool for studying functional brain organization. Limitations of this approach include susceptibility to head motion artifacts and participant drowsiness or sleep. These issues are especially relevant when studying young children or clinical populations. Here we introduce a movie paradigm, Inscapes, that features abstract shapes without a narrative or scene-cuts. The movie was designed to provide enough stimulation to improve compliance related to motion and wakefulness while minimizing cognitive load during the collection of functional imaging data. We compare Inscapes to eyes-open rest and to age-appropriate movie clips in healthy adults (Ocean's Eleven, n=22) and a pilot sample of typically developing children ages 3-7 (Fantasia, n=13). Head motion was significantly lower during both movies relative to rest for both groups. In adults, movies decreased the number of participants who self-reported sleep. Intersubject correlations, used to quantify synchronized, task-evoked activity across movie and rest conditions in adults, involved less cortex during Inscapes than Ocean's Eleven. To evaluate the effect of movie-watching on intrinsic functional connectivity networks, we examined mean functional connectivity using both whole-brain functional parcellation and network-based approaches. Both inter- and intra-network metrics were more similar between Inscapes and Rest than between Ocean's Eleven and Rest, particularly in comparisons involving the default network. When comparing movies to Rest, the mean functional connectivity of somatomotor, visual and ventral attention networks differed significantly across various analyses. We conclude that low-demand movies like Inscapes may represent a useful intermediate condition between task-free rest and typical narrative movies while still improving participant compliance. Inscapes is publicly available for download at headspacestudios.org/inscapes., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Using fMRI, we studied the neural correlates of self-referential processing by comparing BOLD signal changes during self and mother conditions of a self-reference effect (SRE) task. Conjunction analysis of these two conditions showed several common areas of significant activation, including the medial aspects of the superior frontal gyri, left inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral temporal poles, left superior temporal sulcus and left precuneus. The locations of the 7 strongest peak activations for the self condition and for the mother condition were compared on a subject-by-subject basis in native space. Of the 119 pairs of peaks explored, 87% were located within 2 voxels of each other, demonstrating the commonality of the brain regions subserving both self- and mother-referential processing within an individual subject. In group analyses of the self-referential vs. mother-referential contrast, small differences in activation strength were observed in the left superior frontal sulcus, right cingulate gyrus and the left fusiform gyrus. Greater activation for mother than for self was observed in bilateral temporal lobes. Subjects also performed a social attribution task (SAT) in which they inferred mental states about interacting geometric shapes. Activations from this visual theory of mind task were compared with the activations demonstrated during self-referential processing. Striking similarities were found, including overlapping activations in bilateral medial prefrontal cortices, left inferior frontal gyrus and precuneus. These data suggest that reflective analysis of self, mother and abstract others relies predominantly on the same neural architecture.

In the Limbé River valley of northern Haiti a retrospective study at the Bon Samaritain Hospital (BSH) determined the total number of cases and the cyclical nature of malaria from 1975 through 1997, examined the relationship between rainfall and malaria from 1975 through 1985, and compared the incidence of malaria at that hospital with general trends for Haiti for 1975 through 1996 as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). During 1975-1997, 27,078 positive cases of malaria were diagnosed at BSH; 50% of these cases occurred during 16 weeks out of the year, during a summer peak in June and July and a winter peak in December and January. For 1975-1985, there was no significant correlation between the incidence of malaria and annual rainfall. The strongest correlation was observed between weekly rainfall and weekly incidence of malaria when the data was staggered to allow a lag of 9-11 weeks between rainfall and new malaria cases. The lag period is explained by the time required for the creation of breeding sites after rain, the life cycles of the Anopheles albimanus mosquito and the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, and the incubation period for falciparum malaria. The incidence of malaria in the Limbé River valley loosely followed the trends in all of Haiti and also supported WHO reports indicating that malaria in Haiti has been in a general decline since the mid-1980s. By showing the seasonal trends for malaria in the Limbé valley and the relationship between rainfall and malaria over an extended time period, this study provides a means to measure the effectiveness of malaria control efforts in the region.