Video-evoked fMRI BOLD responses are highly consistent across different data acquisition sites

Naturalistic imaging paradigms, in which participants view complex videos in the scanner, are increasingly used in human cognitive neuroscience. Videos evoke temporally synchronized brain responses that are similar across subjects as well as within subjects, but the reproducibility of these brain responses across different data acquisition sites has not yet been quantified. Here, we characterize the consistency of brain responses across independent samples of participants viewing the same videos in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners at different sites (Indiana University and Caltech). We compared brain responses collected at these different sites for two carefully matched datasets with identical scanner models, acquisition, and preprocessing details, along with a third unmatched dataset in which these details varied. Our overall conclusion is that for matched and unmatched datasets alike, video-evoked brain responses have high consistency across these different sites, both when compared across groups and across pairs of individuals. As one might expect, differences between sites were larger for unmatched datasets than matched datasets. Residual differences between datasets could in part reflect participant-level variability rather than scanner- or data- related effects. Altogether our results indicate promise for the development and, critically, generalization of video fMRI studies of individual differences in healthy and clinical populations alike.