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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Neural Typicality During Naturalistic 7T fMRI Reflects Cognitive Performance in Multiple Sclerosis

Ido Har-Shalom¹, Aviv Jarbi¹, Michal Zamberg Elad¹, Hadar Kolb¹, Michal Ramot¹; ¹Weizmann Institute of Science

Presenter: Ido Har-Shalom

Naturalistic stimuli evoke shared neural dynamics across individuals, providing a structured reference for studying brain function under complex, real-world conditions. However, the functional significance of individual deviations from this shared response remains unclear. Here, we quantify Neural Typicality (Ntyp), defined as the voxelwise alignment between an individual’s fMRI time course and a population-derived reference response during naturalistic movie viewing at 7T. We test whether this alignment reflects a general property of cognitive function and whether it captures clinically relevant cognitive decline, focusing on people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS), where cognitive impairment is common but poorly quantified by existing measures. Across participants, lower Ntyp is consistently associated with poorer performance across multiple independent cognitive tasks, establishing Ntyp as a domain-general correlate of cognitive function. In pwMS, even during passive naturalistic viewing, individuals show spatially clustered reductions in Ntyp. Critically, these same regions are those in which Ntyp most strongly explains behavioral variability, linking disease-related deviations in neural dynamics to cognitive performance. These findings, which generalize across independent stimuli and sessions, suggest that alignment to a shared neural response reflects how effectively individuals process complex, naturalistic input, and that deviations from this response provide a behaviorally and clinically meaningful axis of brain function.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations