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A Naturalistic Movie Functional Localizer is Equivalent to a Task Localizer of the Fusiform Face Area in Adolescents with and without Autism

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Clara J Steeby¹ (clara.steeby@childrens.harvard.edu), Gillian N Miller¹, Alexander L Cohen^1,2; ¹Boston Children's Hospital, ²Harvard Medical School

To study face perception with neuroimaging, an additional independent task is typically used to functionally localize the fusiform face area (FFA) in each participant; this can be dull and may negatively impact data quality, especially in clinical or pediatric populations. Here, we explore whether an engaging Pixar short movie can functionally localize the FFA as well as a ‘traditional’ face versus house passive viewing task in adolescents with and without autism (n=48). We obtained the peak activated voxel for each participant, e.g. the ‘best estimate peak’ of the FFA, using statistical maps of face selectivity derived from four runs of a traditional FFA localizer task, masked with the Neurosynth ‘face’ meta-analytic result. We then calculated the Euclidean distance from this best estimate FFA to the peak activated voxel from either a single run of the traditional localizer task or the Pixar movie and compared with a paired t-test.The location of the movie peak voxel was highly consistent with that of the traditional localizer task, in both the left (pairwise m=2.82mm, sd=11.20mm; t(47) = -1.61, p=0.11) and right (pairwise m=1.09mm, sd=11.78mm; t(47) = -0.59, p=0.56) hemisphere, with more consistency in the right hemisphere. Our findings suggest that a short movie may be a reasonable replacement to traditional functional localizers, and depending on the movie, may allow localization of multiple regions simultaneously. Further analyses will explore if participant characteristics impact this alternative localizer’s utility.

Topic Area: METHODS: Neuroimaging