Schedule of Events | Symposia

Brain functional connectivity organization underlying movie watching

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Xuehu Wei^1,2, Laura Rigolo¹, Colin P. Galvin¹, Alexandra J. Golby¹, Einat Liebenthal², Yanmei Tie¹; ¹Department of Neurosurgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, ²McLean Imaging Center, McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Belmont, Massachusetts, USA

Introduction: Movie-watching condition can elicit highly synchronized activity in large-scale brain areas across individuals. Beside activity in brain areas, cognitive processing relies on interactions within a complex network of brain regions. In this study, we aim to understand the functional organization of brain networks underlying movie watching. Methods: Twenty-two healthy, right-handed native English speakers (11 males, mean age = 26.3 years) underwent fMRI while watching a 7-minute family movie clip. Using intersubject functional correlation (ISFC) analysis, we investigated the functional network organization across 360 cortical and 16 subcortical regions. We then identified a "rich club" of highly connected hubs of brain network topology. We also performed inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis and graph theoretical analysis to assess the synchrony and global network properties of brain activation. Results: Our study identified a "rich club" (p < 0.001, permutation testing), consisting of 42 regions with a degree k ≥ 68 located in bilateral superior temporal and parietal cortex gyri, visual cortex, and parahippocampus. ISC analysis showed higher synchrony (p < 0.005, FDR corrected) in all rich-club regions. Centrality analysis revealed a high level of betweenness centrality for rich-club regions: over 71% of the shortest paths in the brain networks passed through at least one rich-club region, and 31% passed through at least one rich-club connection. Conclusion: “Brain hubs” - high-degree regions - in the temporal-parietal language system, visual cortex, dorsal attention network, and emotion system exhibit strong interconnectivity, forming a central rich club essential for facilitating whole-brain communication during movie watching.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other