Going from simplified to naturalistic tasks in human fMRI and MEG/EEG studies: possibilities and challenge

Iiro Jääskeläinen gives an overview on how ecologically valid naturalistic stimuli can be used to study higher cognitive functions and emotions.

Do different people experience movies the same way? Can movies be used as a “social localizer”? What happens when movie viewers adopt another perspective?

Rapid development of neuroimaging methods has made it possible to investigate human neurocognitive functions non-invasively. What has been more challenging until relatively recently, is the use of more ecologically valid naturalistic stimuli that could be especially especially useful in study of higher cognitive functions and emotions. In our early research, we have demonstrated that prefrontal cortical areas, in addition to sensory-cortical areas, show reliable inter-subject correlation of brain hemodynamic activity during watching of a drama film, and that low-frequency activity is especially correlated across subjects, possibly relating to findings of there being hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in the human brain. In our subsequent studies, we have shown that 1) subjective continuous self-reports of experienced emotions can be utilized to reveal brain regions that correlate across subjects over time as a function of experienced emotions. 2) By combining a large number of clips with different social and non-social control features, we have built a social localizer stimulus that has demonstrated posterior superior temporal sulcus as the "hub" for processing social cues. 3) We have shown that by asking subjects to adopt two different perspectives, social vs. non-social one, when viewing a movie clip, it can be revealed which brain regions are involved in the process of filtering perspective-specific information. 4) We have developed methods that improve the temporal resolution of inter-subject similarity measures.

This talk is part of the Aalto Brain Centre (ABC) seminar series.