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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Inter-subject correlation of brain hemodynamic responses during watching a movie: localization in space and frequency

Jukka-Pekka Kauppi¹*, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen², Mikko Sams² and Jussi Tohka¹

Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science and Engineering, Espoo, Finland

Cinema is a promising naturalistic stimulus that enables, for instance, elicitation of robust emotions during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Inter-subject correlation (ISC) has been used as a model-free analysis method to map the highly complex hemodynamic responses that are evoked during watching a movie. Here, we extended the ISC analysis to frequency domain using wavelet analysis combined with non-parametric permutation methods for making voxel-wise statistical inferences about frequency-band specific ISC. We applied these novel analysis methods to a dataset collected in our previous study where 12 subjects watched an emotionally engaging movie “Crash” during fMRI scanning. Our results suggest that several regions within the frontal and temporal lobes show ISC predominantly at low frequency bands, whereas visual cortical areas exhibit ISC also at higher frequencies. It is possible that these findings relate to recent observations of a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, or that the types of events processed in temporal and prefrontal cortical areas (e.g., social interactions) occur over longer time periods than the stimulus features processed in the visual areas. Software tools to perform frequency-specific ISC analysis, together with a visualization application, are available as open source Matlab code.

Keywords:

natural vision, BOLD, fMRI, intersubject correlation, stationary wavelet transform, permutation test

Citation:

Kauppi J-P, Jääskeläinen IP, Sams M and Tohka J (2010). Inter-subject correlation of brain hemodynamic responses during watching a movie: localization in space and frequency. Front. Neuroinform. 4:5. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2010.00005

Received:

30 April 2009;

Paper pending published:

19 August 2009;

Accepted:

01 March 2010;

Published online:

19 March 2010.

Edited by:

Ulla Ruotsalainen, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

Reviewed by:

Uri Hasson, Princeton University, USA
Erno Hermans, RadBoud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

© 2010 Kauppi, Jääskeläinen, Sams and Tohka. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Jukka-Pekka Kauppi, Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, 33101 Tampere, Finland. e-mail: jukka-pekka.kauppi@tut.fi