Intersubject Spatial Pattern Correlations During Movie Viewing Are Stimulus-Driven and Nonuniform Across the Cortex

A fundamental step to predicting brain activity in healthy and diseased populations is characterizing the common spatio-temporal response to a shared experience. Multivoxel pattern analysis allows us to investigate information encoding through these patterns; however, we have yet to explore local, stimulus-driven, patterns of cortical activity during naturalistic stimulation. We sought to examine these patterns with minimum interpolation—excluding functional alignment—to characterize the most basic degree of shared response between subjects. We used an unbiased analytic approach, combined with rich, naturalistic, and nonsemantic stimulation to estimate shared spatial patterns in functional magnetic resonance imaging responses across a large group. We found that meso-scale spatial patterns were shared nonuniformly across the visual cortex and represent information distinct from the shared temporal response. Shared spatial patterns were stimulus-driven, modulated by pattern size, and more sensitive to the contrast of 3D versus 2D stimulus differences than the temporal signals. Although the grand functional structure of the brain is understood to be common, these results suggest that even at a meso-scale, we share common spatial structures with anatomical alignment alone. The strength of this similarity varies across the cortex, suggesting some spatial structures are innately organized, whereas others are shaped by factors such as learning and plasticity.