Imagine your brain is like a movie theater, with different groups of audience members watching the same film. Researchers have recently used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that measures brain activity, to investigate how people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) individuals respond to movies. They found that certain movie events, specifically those involving character emotions, elicited different brain responses in the two groups. In the ASD group, areas in the brain responsible for processing emotions, such as the middle temporal gyrus and temporal pole, showed lower activity compared to TD individuals. Additionally, the ASD group had decreased functional connectivity between different brain networks. Surprisingly, when focusing on movie events related to objects and scenes, the attentional networks in the brains of individuals with ASD showed strong synchronization, along with increased connectivity between certain brain networks. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD have their own unique way of processing movies rather than being unresponsive. This research not only provides valuable insights into how the brains of people with ASD function during movie-watching but also offers a new method for exploring the mechanisms underlying this complex disorder.

Recently, movie-watching fMRI has been recognized as a novel method to explore brain working patterns. Previous researchers correlated natural stimuli with brain responses to explore brain functional specialization by “reverse correlation” methods, which were based on within-group analysis. However, what external stimuli drove significantly different brain responses in two groups of different subjects were still unknown. To address this, sliding time windows technique combined with inter-Subject functional correlation (ISFC) was proposed to detect movie events with significant group differences between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typical development (TD) subjects. Then, using inter-Subject correlation (ISC) and ISFC analysis, we found that in three movie events involving character emotions, the ASD group showed significantly lower ISC in the middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, cerebellum, caudate, precuneus, and showed decreased functional connectivity between large scale networks than that in TD. Under the movie event focusing on objects and scenes shot, the dorsal and ventral attentional networks of ASD had a strong synchronous response. Meanwhile, ASD also displayed increased functional connectivity between the frontoparietal network (FPN) and dorsal attention network (DAN), FPN, and sensorimotor network (SMN) than TD. ASD has its own unique synchronous response rather than being “unresponsive” in natural movie-watching. Our findings provide a new method and valuable insight for exploring the inconsistency of the brain “tick collectively” to same natural stimuli. This analytic approach has the potential to explore pathological mechanisms and promote training methods of ASD.

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