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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Connectivity Hyperalignment Reveals Shared Fine-Scale Functional Organization in the Human Subcortex

Jiaxin Cindy Tu¹, Ma Feilong², Yuqi Zhang¹, Maria Gobbini³, James Haxby¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of South Carolina, ³University of Bologna

Presenter: Jiaxin Cindy Tu

Subcortical structures play central roles in cognitive, emotional, and social processing, yet studying their functional organization with fMRI is challenging due to their small size, low signal-to-noise ratio, and anatomical variability across individuals. Although spatial smoothing is commonly used to mitigate these issues, it can obscure fine-grained functional structure by mixing signals from neighboring nuclei. Here, we test an alternative way of increasing cross-subject alignment with connectivity hyperalignment (CHA). Applying this approach to naturalistic movie fMRI data, we find that CHA markedly increases cross-subject synchronization of both responses and connectivity in subcortical regions. Our results demonstrate the potential of voxel-level group analyses without spatial smoothing and provide a new framework for studying human subcortical circuit organization.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding