Dynamic Inter-subject Functional Connectivity Reveals Moment-to-Moment Brain Network Configurations Driven by Continuous or Communication Paradigms

Task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging bears great potential to understand how our brain reacts to various types of stimulation; however, this is often achieved without considering the dynamic facet of functional processing, and analytical outputs typically account for merged influences of task-driven effects and underlying spontaneous fluctuations of brain activity. Here, we introduce a novel methodological pipeline that can go beyond these limitations: the use of a sliding-window analytical scheme permits tracking of functional changes over time, and through cross-subject correlational measurements, the approach can isolate purely stimulus-related effects. Thanks to a rigorous thresholding process, significant changes in inter-subject functional correlation can be extracted and analyzed. On a set of healthy subjects who underwent naturalistic audio-visual stimulation, we demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by tying the unraveled functional reconfigurations to particular cues of the movie. We show how, through our method, one can capture either a temporal profile of brain activity (the evolution of a given connection), or focus on a spatial snapshot at a key time point. We provide a publicly available version of the whole pipeline, and describe its use and the influence of its key parameters step by step.