Biology subjects

Vanderwal, T.

Publications and source records attributed to Vanderwal, T..

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Cross-state stability and maturational similarity of the social brain connectome in children and adolescents

The intra-individual stability of functional connectivity (FC) across two or more scans and the inter-individual similarity of FC patterns relative to peers capture developmental variability in functional brain organization. Despite their different referents, these measures are strongly coupled at the whole brain level; however, it remains unclear whether this relationship emerges in development, whether it extends to the social brain, and whether it differs by sex. Based on the importance of social development in this age range, we hypothesized that known developmental relationships and sex-specific effects would be more pronounced in the social brain relative to the whole brain. Using a large psychiatrically enriched sample of 769 youth ages 6-21 (female N = 327, mean age = 12.27 years), we computed FC during rest and movie-watching scans and quantified stability across scans as well as similarity to mature subjects (n=36) within each condition. We then tested whether sex-dependent age relationships were captured by these measures or by the strength of their coupling. Our results showed that cross-state stability and maturational similarity are strongly coupled in development, and that this coupling is enhanced in the social brain relative to the whole brain. Furthermore, the strength of stability-similarity coupling increased as a function of age in females, while males showed the opposite effect. When assessing relationships between age and each FC measure independently, no individual effects were significant after FDR correction. However, our multivariate age-prediction models fared much better, demonstrating that edgewise stability and maturational similarity measures can capture spatially heterogeneous developmental effects that are lost when collapsing across edges. Together, these results support the emerging idea that the degree of FC stability across scans is related to how closely an individuals functional architecture aligns to a shared template. Here, we newly show that this stability-similarity coupling is stronger in the social brain and varies with age in sex-specific ways. Future longitudinal work is needed to establish whether these cross-sectional relationships also characterize within-person developmental change.

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bioRxiv2026

Early sensory deprivation drives local reorganization of sensory integration within a conserved global hierarchy

The human brain processes sensory information through a hierarchical system, from primary to higher-level regions, integrating inputs across modalities to support perception and cognition. While early sensory loss triggers widespread neuroplastic changes, its impact on integration across the cortical hierarchy remains unclear. Here, we examined the cortical reorganization of individuals with early blindness and deafness using a sensory integration framework that quantifies how brain regions prioritize different sensory inputs across the hierarchy. We found that early sensory deprivation drives highly localized reorganization adjacent to the deprived primary cortical areas: extrastriate cortex in early blindness and the superior temporal cortex in early deafness. These findings were further corroborated by analysis of the functional gradients, which found reorganization within these sensory regions. Notably, the hierarchy was largely preserved across groups. However, the sensory integration framework uniquely detected reorganization in language-related regions in deaf individuals with knowledge of a visual communication system known as cued speech. The specific differences between early deaf and hearing individuals remained restricted to superior temporal cortex. Together, our findings demonstrate that early sensory deprivation drives targeted reorganization adjacent to the affected primary sensory cortex, while preserving the overall hierarchy of cortical integration.

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bioRxiv2026

Pregistered movie-fMRI analyses reveal altered visual feature encoding in autism in pSTS

Sensory-perceptual differences are widely reported in autism, yet their underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We tested preregistered hypotheses using stacked encoding models applied to naturalistic movie-viewing fMRI from children and adolescents with and without an autism diagnosis from the Healthy Brain Network. We mapped cortical responsiveness to low- and high-level auditory and visual feature spaces. Contrary to enhanced perceptual functioning predictions, autism was not associated with increased low-level encoding in primary sensory cortices. Instead, autistic children and adolescents had reduced high-level visual representations and a relative shift toward low-level over high-level feature encoding in integration and social brain regions including the pSTS and adjacent face/social areas. In pSTS, this high-low weighting tracked Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) scores. By contrast, audio-visual modality preference and sensory dominance were broadly conserved across groups. Developmentally, encoding exhibited strong, lateralized, modality-congruent age effects. Together, these findings favor weak central coherence accounts over early sensory enhancement, constrain mechanisms to altered visual feature weighting within social/multisensory networks, and demonstrate the value of naturalistic stimuli and encoding models for characterizing sensory-perceptual neurodevelopmental differences.

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bioRxiv2026

Individualized network topography in pre-adolescent children and adults using naturalistic precision fMRI

Group-averaged network definitions, commonly used in developmental functional connectivity research, limit our understanding of how network topography may change with age and can lead to inaccurate estimates of age effects on intra- and inter-network functional connectivity. Here, we collected a precision fMRI dataset from 24 parent-child pairs (children 6 to 8 years, 13 females; adults 33 to 47 years, 12 females) during passive video viewing and derived individual template-matched functional network maps from 60 minutes of motion-censored data per participant. Overall, large-scale network architecture was broadly shared between children and adults, with no age-effects observed for network-level surface area, few age differences in network boundaries and generally lower assignment confidence in children. Considering inter-individual similarity in network topography, association networks showed stronger within-family similarity and no overall effect of age on similarity of networks between pairs of individuals. We further asked how individualized network definitions might impact estimates of age effects on dense functional connectivity. While all approaches pointed to greater within-network functional connectivity in adults, we found that individualized approaches had larger age effects and lower sensitivity to head motion. Together, our results suggest that, relative to adults, pre-adolescent children show reduced network assignment confidence and weaker within-network connectivity, but limited differences in network borders and size, and underscore the value of individualized mapping for increasing sensitivity to age effects.

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bioRxiv2025

Patterns of intersubject correlations parallel organizational gradients during naturalistic viewing

Recent studies have robustly demonstrated that human cortical function can be described through sensory-transmodal gradients of cortical function, while naturalistic movie watching paradigms have been leveraged to index cortical synchronization. We leveraged two independent 7T movie fMRI datasets to assess correlations between intersubject correlation and functional gradients across movies, datasets, and spatial scales. At the whole-brain level, we observed robust relationships between intersubject correlations and a visual-transmodal connectivity gradient which was independent of movie content. Within functional networks, correlations were particularly pronounced for the visual, dorsal attention, and default mode networks. Our results demonstrate that naturalistic paradigms can provide targeted insight into multiscale processing hierarchies. Robust relationships across movies suggest that movie-watching can be viewed as a brain state that is independent of movie-content. Overall, this work suggests an important confluence of within-subject functional organizational axes and inter-subject synchronization when the brain is engaged in the processing of naturalistic stimuli.

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bioRxiv2025

State dependent shifts in large scale functional topographies

Although functional networks can be consistently identified across cognitive states, they also undergo dynamic reconfigurations across different contexts. For example, naturalistic movie watching paradigms amplify activity in sensory systems compared to resting conditions. However, it remains unclear how these different states affect large-scale brain organization. The current study leveraged high-resolution in vivo 7T fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and the Precision NeuroImaging (PNI) datasets to examine large scale functional connectivity changes between resting and movie-watching conditions. To understand these changes within topographic and geometric principles of brain organization, connectivity shifts were stratified relative to macroscale cortical hierarchy and geodesic distance. Our results revealed that primary sensory areas showed increased local connectivity and reduced long-range interactions during movie watching relative to resting conditions, whereas the default mode network (DMN) exhibited an opposing pattern characterized by reduced within-network long-range connectivity and enhanced connectivity with distant regions outside the DMN. Together, these findings demonstrate that different cognitive states involve geometry-and hierarchy-informed reorganization of large-scale functional networks.

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bioRxiv2025

Cortical language areas are coupled via a soft hierarchy of model-based linguistic features

Natural language comprehension is a complex task that relies on coordinated activity across a network of cortical regions. In this study, we propose that regions of the language network are coupled to one another through subspaces of shared linguistic features. To test this idea, we developed a model-based connectivity framework to quantify stimulus-driven, feature-specific functional connectivity between language areas during natural language comprehension. Using fMRI data acquired while subjects listened to spoken narratives, we tested three types of features extracted from a unified neural network model for speech and language: low-level acoustic embeddings, mid-level speech embeddings, and high-level language embeddings. Our modeling framework enabled us to quantify the proportions of stimulus features driving connectivity between regions: early auditory areas were coupled to intermediate language areas via lower-level acoustic and speech features; in contrast, higher-order language and default-mode regions were predominantly coupled through more abstract language features. We observed a clear progression of feature-specific connectivity from early auditory to lateral temporal areas, advancing from acoustic connectivity to speech- and finally to language-driven connectivity. Our findings suggest that higher-order language areas are coupled along increasingly higher level, more contextualized language features.

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bioRxiv2024

How much is 'enough'? Considerations for functional connectivity reliability in pediatric naturalistic fMRI

functional connectivity (FC) measurements are important for robust and reproducible findings, yet pediatric functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) faces unique challenges due to head motion and bias toward shorter scans. Passive viewing conditions during fMRI offer advantages for scanning pediatric populations, but FC reliability under these conditions remains underexplored. Here, we used precision fMRI data collected across three passive viewing conditions to directly compare FC reliability profiles between 25 pre-adolescent children and 25 adults, with each participant providing over 2.8 hours of data over four sessions. We found that FC test-retest correlations increased asymptotically with scan length, with children requiring nearly twice the post-censored scan time (24.6 minutes) compared to adults (14.4 minutes) to achieve comparable reliability, and that this effect was only partly attributable to head motion. Reliability differences between lower-motion adults and higher-motion children were spatially non-uniform and largest in ventral anterior temporal and frontal regions. While averaging features within functional networks improved intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) reliability, values for higher-motion children remained in the poor-to-fair ICC range even with 48 minutes of total scan time. Viewing conditions with greater engagement reduced head motion in children but had lower FC reliability compared to less engaging low-demand videos, suggesting complex state- or condition-related trade-offs. These findings have important implications for developmental neuroimaging study design, particularly for higher motion pediatric populations.

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bioRxiv2024

Increasing the representation of minoritized youth for inclusive and reproducible brain-behavior associations

Population neuroscience datasets allow researchers to estimate reliable effect sizes for brain-behavior associations because of their large sample sizes. However, these datasets undergo strict quality control to mitigate sources of noise, such as head motion. This practice often excludes a disproportionate number of minoritized individuals. We employ motion-ordering and motion-ordering+resampling (bagging) to test if these methods preserve functional MRI (fMRI) data in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (N=5,733). Black and Hispanic youth exhibited excess head motion relative to data collected from White youth, and were discarded disproportionately when using conventional approaches. Both methods retained more than 99% of Black and Hispanic youth. They produced reproducible brain-behavior associations across low-/high-motion racial/ethnic groups based on motion-limited fMRI data. The motion-ordering and bagging methods are two feasible approaches that can enhance sample representation for testing brain-behavior associations and fulfill the promise of consortia datasets to produce generalizable effect sizes across diverse populations.

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bioRxiv2024

Using fingerprinting as a testbed for strategies to improve reproducibility of functional connectivity

Reproducible functional connectivity-based biomarkers have remained elusive despite the promise of deeply phenotyped consortia. An important component of reproducibility is reliability over repeated measures, often measured by the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Here, we test the use of functional connectome fingerprinting as a way to select pre- and post-processing parameters. We hypothesized that whichever parameters yielded the best fingerprint accuracies would also improve the ICC across scans. Using five datasets from the Consortium for Replicability and Reproducibility, we found that higher identification accuracies were achieved when using: (I) global signal regression; (II) finer brain parcellations; (III) cortical regions compared to subcortical and cerebellar structures; (IV) medial frontal and frontoparietal networks relative to the whole-brain; (V) discriminative edges; (VI) longer scan duration; and (VII) lower sample size. We observed that the ICC was consistently "poor" across the five datasets even with the application of two optimal fingerprint-informed pipelines. The fingerprint-informed pipelines may enable comparison, benchmarking, and adjudication of functional connectivity-based analysis pipelines or novel analytic approaches, as a means to enhance their reproducibility in heterogeneous populations. Key PointsO_LIConnectome-based fingerprinting can provide a useful testbed for reproducible functional connectivity analysis pipelines. C_LIO_LIFingerprint-informed pipelines offer an intuitive and less resource intensive way to select data pre-/post-processing parameters for improving the reproducibility of the functional connectome. C_LIO_LIConnectome-based fingerprinting offers an alternative approach to test-retest reliability. C_LI

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bioRxiv2024

Data rescue in high-motion youth cohorts for robust and reproducible brain-behavior relationships

Recognition of the detrimental impact of participant motion on functional connectivity measures has led to the adoption of increasingly stringent quality control standards to minimize potential motion artifacts. These stringent standards can lead to the exclusion of many participants, creating a tension with a countervailing requirement for large sample sizes that can provide adequate statistical power, particularly for brain-behavior association studies. Here, we test and validate two techniques aimed at mitigating the impact of head motion on functional connectivity estimates, and show that these techniques enable the retention of a substantial proportion of participants who would otherwise be excluded based on motion criteria, such as a minimum mean framewise displacement (FD) threshold. Specifically, we first show that functional connectomes computed using time series data that have been ordered according to motion (i.e., framewise displacement -- FD) and (1) subsetted to include the lowest-motion time points ("motion ordered") or (2) subsetted and resampled ("bagged") are reproducible, in that they enable the successful identification of an individual from a group using functional connectome fingerprinting. Second, we demonstrate that motion-ordered and bagged functional connectomes yield robust brain-behavior associations, which, when examined as a function of sample size, are comparable to those obtained using the standard full time series. Finally, we show that the utility of both approaches lies in maximizing participant inclusivity by allowing for the retention of high-motion participants that would otherwise be discarded. Given equivalent performance of the two approaches across these tests of reproducibility, validity, and utility, we conclude by recommending motion-ordering to enable data rescue, maximize inclusivity, and address the need for adequately powered samples in functional connectivity research, while maintaining stringent data quality standards. While our findings were reproducible across different head motion thresholds and edges in the functional connectome, we outline possibilities for further validation and assessment of generalization using other behavioral phenotypes and consortia datasets.

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bioRxiv2024

Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching

Movie-watching is a central aspect of our lives and an important paradigm for understanding the brain mechanisms behind cognition as it occurs in daily life. Contemporary views of ongoing thought argue that the ability to make sense of events in the here and now depend on the neural processing of incoming sensory information by auditory and visual cortex, which are kept in check by systems in association cortex. However, we currently lack an understanding of how patterns of ongoing thoughts map onto the different brain systems when we watch a film, partly because methods of sampling experience disrupt the dynamics of brain activity and the experience of movie-watching. Our study established a novel method for mapping thought patterns onto the brain activity that occurs at different moments of a film, which does not disrupt the time course of brain activity or the movie-watching experience. We found moments when experience sampling highlighted engagement with multi-sensory features of the film or highlighted thoughts with episodic features, regions of sensory cortex were more active and subsequent memory for events in the movie was better--on the other hand, periods of intrusive distraction emerged when activity in regions of association cortex within the frontoparietal system was reduced. These results highlight the critical role sensory systems play in the multi- modal experience of movie-watching and provide evidence for the role of association cortex in reducing distraction when we watch films. Significance statementStates like movie-watching provide a window into the brain mechanisms behind cognition in daily life. However, we know relatively little about the mapping between brain activity during movies and associated thought patterns because of difficulties in measuring cognition without disrupting how brain activity naturally unfolds. We establish a novel method to link different experiential states to brain activity during movie-watching with minimal interruptions to viewers or disruptions to brain dynamics. We found states of sensory engagement occur in moments of films when activity in visual and auditory cortex are high. In contrast, states of distraction are reduced when activity in frontoparietal regions is high. Our study, therefore, establishes both sensory and association cortex as core features of the movie-watching experience.

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bioRxiv2023

Temporal Complexity of the BOLD-Signal In Preterm Versus Term Infants

Preterm birth causes alterations in cerebral development. We calculated the Hurst exponent (H) - a measure of temporal complexity - from resting state functional magnetic resonance signal in preterm and term born infants. Anatomical, fMRI, and diffusion weighted imaging data from 716 neonates born between 23-43 weeks gestational age were obtained from the Developing Human Connectome Project. H was assessed in brain tissues and 13 resting state networks. H significantly increased with age, and earlier birth age contributed to lower H values. In most brain regions, H begins below 0.5 at preterm age and crosses 0.5 at term age. Motor and sensory networks demonstrated the greatest increase in H. Correlations between indirect measures of myelination and H were moderate. Overall, H appears to reflect developmental processes in the neonatal brain, as BOLD signal in the preterm infant transforms from anticorrelated to correlated but is reduced compared to term born infants.

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bioRxiv2022

Cortical gradients during naturalistic processing are hierarchical and modality-specific

Understanding cortical topographic organization and how it supports complex perceptual and cognitive processes is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Previous work has characterized functional gradients that demonstrate large-scale principles of cortical organization. How these gradients are modulated by rich ecological stimuli remains unknown. Here, we utilize naturalistic stimuli via movie-fMRI to assess macroscale functional organization. We identify principal movie gradients that delineate separate hierarchies anchored in sensorimotor, visual, and auditory/language areas. At the opposite/heteromodal end of these perception-to-cognition axes, we find a more central role for the frontoparietal network along with the default network. Even across different movie stimuli, movie gradients demonstrated good reliability, suggesting that these hierarchies reflect a brain state common across different naturalistic conditions. The relative position of brain areas within movie gradients showed stronger and more numerous correlations with cognitive behavioral scores compared to resting state gradients. Together, these findings provide an ecologically valid representation of the principles underlying cortical organization while the brain is active and engaged in multimodal, dynamic perceptual and cognitive processing. HighlightsO_LIMovie-fMRI reveals novel, more granular principles of hierarchical cortical organization C_LIO_LITop movie gradients delineate three separate perception-to-cognition hierarchies C_LIO_LIA distinctive third gradient in movie-watching is anchored by auditory/language regions C_LIO_LIGradient scores demonstrate good reliability even across different movie stimuli C_LIO_LIMovie gradients yield stronger correlations with behavior relative to resting state gradients C_LI

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bioRxiv2020

Narratives: fMRI data for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

The "Narratives" collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging.

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bioRxiv2020

Exploring patterns of ongoing thought under naturalistic and task-based conditions

Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of a wide range of tasks and individual affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. In total, we used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experience sampling. A Principle Component Analysis of the experience sampling data revealed four patterns of ongoing thought. Linear Mixed Modelling was used to examine the contextual distribution of the thought patterns. Different thought patterns were found to relate to different types of conditions. Intrusive and negative thought pattern expression was found to be influenced by individual affective style (depression level). Overall, these data show that patterns of thought are subject to both contextual and intrinsic variation, suggesting that understanding these important features of experience across a broad range of situations will be useful in understanding their role in human experience. HighlightsO_LIPatterns of thought vary across different task contexts C_LIO_LIThought pattern expression is influenced by individual affective style C_LIO_LIThere is a need to broaden the tasks used to study ongoing thought C_LI

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bioRxiv2019

Stability and similarity of the pediatric connectome as developmental outcomes

Patterns of functional connectivity are unique at the individual level, enabling test-retest matching algorithms to identify a subject from among a group using only their functional connectome. Recent findings show that accuracies of these algorithms in children increase with age. Relatedly, the persistence of functional connectivity (FC) patterns across tasks and rest also increases with age. This study investigated the hypothesis that within-subject stability and between-subject similarity of the whole-brain pediatric connectome are developmentally relevant outcomes. Using data from 210 help-seeking children and adolescents, ages 6-21 years (Healthy Brain Network Biobank), we computed whole-brain FC matrices for each participant during two different movies (MovieDM and MovieTP) and two runs of task-free rest (all from a single scan session) and fed these matrices to a test-retest matching algorithm. We replicated the finding that matching accuracies for children and youth (ages 6-21 years) are low (18-44%), and that cross-state and cross-movie accuracies were the lowest. Results also showed that parcellation resolution and the number of volumes used in each matrix affect fingerprinting accuracies. Next, we calculated three measures of whole-connectome stability for each subject: cross-rest (Rest1-Rest2), crossstate (MovieDM-Rest1), and cross-movie (MovieDM-MovieTP), and three measures of within-state between-subject connectome similarity for Rest1, MovieDM, and MovieTP. We show that stability and similarity were correlated, but that these measures were not related to age. A principal component analysis of these measures yielded two components that we used to test for brain-behavior correlations with IQ, general psychopathology, and social skills measures (n=119). The first component was significantly correlated with the social skills measure (r=-0.26, p=0.005). Post hoc correlations showed that the social skills measure correlated with both cross-rest stability (r=-0.29, p=0.001) and with connectome similarity during MovieDM (r=-0.28, p=0.002). These findings suggest that the stability and similarity of the whole-brain connectome relate to overall brain development, and in particular, to those regions that support social skills. We infer that the development of the functional connectome simultaneously achieves patterns of FC that are distinct at the individual subject level, that are shared across individuals, and that are persistent across states and across runs--features which presumably combine to optimize neural processing during development. Future longitudinal work could reveal the developmental trajectories of stability and similarity of the connectome. Highlights- Identification algorithms yielded low accuracies in this developmental sample. - Individual differences in FC were not as persistent across states or movies. - Connectome within-subject stability and between-subject similarity were interrelated. - Stability during rest and similarity during a movie correlate with social skills scores.

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bioRxiv2018

The functional brain organization of an individual predicts measures of social abilities in autism spectrum disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with multiple complex abnormalities in functional brain connectivity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Despite much research in this area, to date, neuroimaging-based models are not able to characterize individuals with ASD with sufficient sensitivity and specificity; this is likely due to the heterogeneity and complexity of this disorder. Here we apply a data-driven subject-level approach, connectome-based predictive modeling, to resting-state fMRI data from a set of individuals from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange. Using leave-one-subject-out and split-half analyses, we define two functional connectivity networks that predict continuous scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and confirm that these networks generalize to novel subjects. Notably, these networks were found to share minimal anatomical overlap. Further, our results generalize to individuals for whom SRS/ADOS scores are unavailable, predicting worse scores for ASD than typically developing individuals. In addition, predicted SRS scores for individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from the ADHD-200 Consortium are linked to ADHD symptoms, supporting the hypothesis that the functional brain organization changes relevant to ASD severity share a component associated with attention. Finally, we explore the membership of predictive connections within conventional (atlas-based) functional networks. In summary, our results suggest that an individuals functional connectivity profile contains information that supports dimensional, non-binary classification in ASD, aligning with the goals of precision medicine and individual-level diagnosis.

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