Functional connectome and metastability in naturalistic neuroimaging
Recent MEG results demonstrated that the differentiation of the functional connectome occurs predominantly in non-linear segments of brain activity; however, there is no replication of this finding in fMRI data. In addition, the current commitment to Open Science is a key principle for the existence of open databases, and promoting their use is essential. In this context, a vast body of evidence points to various technical, methodological, and epistemological advantages of using naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging research, particularly for subject differentiation and dynamic analysis. On the other hand, most studies lack analyses that consider the specificity and duration of the stimuli. Thus, this research used the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Database, consisting of 86 subjects who watched entire movies inside of a MRI scanner, and aimed to address the hypothesis that the aforementioned relationship would occur similarly with these data. The dynamics will be calculated as a signature of signal metastability in the regions, and identification (Iself) and similarity (Iothers) as measures extracted from the fingerprinting matrix. As a secondary analysis, we will deepen the investigation at the level of functional networks, at the level of movies, and the local dependency of global dynamics at each level of analysis.