Brain connectivity at rest predicts individual differences in normative activity during movie watching

When exposed to the same sensory event, some individuals are bound to have less typical experiences than others. Previous research has investigated this phenomenon by showing that the typicality of one’s sensory experience is associated with the typicality of their stimulus-evoked brain activity (as measured by intersubject correlation, or ISC). Individual differences in ISC have recently been attributed to variability in focal neural processing. However, the extent to which these differences reflect purely intra-regional variability versus variation in the brain’s baseline ability to transmit information between regions has yet to be established. Here, we show that an individual’s degree and spatial distribution of ISC are closely related to their brain’s functional organization at rest. Using resting state and movie watching fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project, we reveal that resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) profiles can be used to predict cortex-wide ISC. Similar region-level analyses demonstrate that the levels of ISC exhibited by brain regions during movie watching are associated with their connectivity to other regions at rest, and that the nature of these connectivity-activity relationships varies as a function of regional roles in sensory information processing. Finally, we show that an individual’s unique spatial distribution of ISC, independent of its magnitude, is also related to their RSFC profile. These findings contextualize reports of localized individual differences in ISC as potentially reflecting larger, network-level alterations in resting brain function and detail how the brain’s ability to process complex sensory information is linked to its baseline functional organization.