Comparison of functional connectivity networks during movie-viewing vs. resting-state with whole-head fNIRS

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Virginia Chambers¹, Isabel Nichoson², Richard Aslin^1,3, Sara Sanchez-Alonso¹; ¹Yale University, ²Tulane University, ³University of Connecticut

Extensive fMRI data has revealed the presence of intrinsic functional connectivity networks (FCNs) that can predict a variety of phenotypes (e.g., individual variations in attention: Rosenberg et al., 2016). However, these FCNs are state-dependent, showing reliable differences between resting-state and movie-viewing (Sanchez-Alonso et al., 2021), even though these two states share extensive network commonalities (Greene et al., 2020). Although differences in FCNs between resting-state and movie-viewing are present in children as young as 5 years of age (Sanchez-Alonso et al., 2021), we know very little about FCNs in younger children and infants, in part because fMRI data collection during movie-viewing in children under 4 years of age is challenging (e.g., head motion can lead to spurious FC measures). To set the stage for studies of FCNs in infants and young children, we collected resting-state and movie-viewing data from 42 adults using whole-head fNIRS. Our goal was to determine whether fNIRS has sufficient spatial resolution and SNR to capture reliable FCN differences between resting-state and movie-viewing. All participants viewed three 3.5-minute video clips from the movie Despicable Me and also provided a 10-minute, fixation-cross resting-state run. Whole-head, 105-channel fNIRS data, with short-channel regression of surface vascular noise, generated two group-level FC matrices (resting-state and movie-viewing) of all pairwise channel correlations. A Spearman rank-order correlation confirmed that these two FC matrices were reliably different (rho=-0.576, p<0.001), replicating the fMRI findings from Sanchez-Alonso et al. (2021) and providing support for the utility of fNIRS for studies of FCNs in infants and young children.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging