Network-Level Connectivity Dynamics of Movie Watching in 6-Year-Old Children

Better understanding of the developing brain’s functional mechanisms is critical for improving diagnosis and treatment of different developmental disorders. Particularly, characterizing how the developing brain dynamically reorganizes during different cognitive states may offer novel insight into the neuronal mechanisms of cognitive deficits. Imaging the brain during naturalistic conditions, like movie watching, provides a highly practical way to study young children’s developing functional brain systems. In this study we compared the network-level functional organization of 6-year-old children while they were at rest with their functional connectivity as they watched short video clips. We employed both a data-driven independent component analysis (ICA) approach and a hypothesis-driven seed-based analysis to identify changes in network-level functional interactions during the shift from resting to video watching. Our ICA results showed that naturally watching a movie elicits significant changes in the functional connectivity between the visual system and the dorsal attention network when compared to rest (t((32)) = 5.02, p = 0.0001). More interestingly, children showed an immature, but qualitatively adult-like, pattern of reorganization among three of the brain’s higher-order networks (frontal control, default-mode and dorsal attention). For both ICA and seed-based approaches, we observed a decrease in the frontal network’s correlation with the dorsal attention network (ICA: t((32)) = −2.46, p = 0.02; Seed-based: t((32)) = −1.62, p =0.12) and an increase in its connectivity with the default mode network (ICA: t((32)) = 2.84, p = 0.008; Seed-based: t((32)) = 2.28, p =0.03), which is highly consistent with the pattern observed in adults. These results offer improved understanding of the developing brain’s dynamic network-level interaction patterns during the transition between different brain states and call for further studies to examine potential alterations to such dynamic patterns in different developmental disorders.