The “Narratives” fMRI dataset for evaluating models of naturalistic language comprehension

The “Narratives” collection aggregates a variety of functional MRI datasets collected while human subjects listened to naturalistic spoken stories. The current release includes 345 subjects, 891 functional scans, and 27 diverse stories of varying duration totaling ~4.6 hours of unique stimuli (~43,000 words). This data collection is well-suited for naturalistic neuroimaging analysis, and is intended to serve as a benchmark for models of language and narrative comprehension. We provide standardized MRI data accompanied by rich metadata, preprocessed versions of the data ready for immediate use, and the spoken story stimuli with time-stamped phoneme- and word-level transcripts. All code and data are publicly available with full provenance in keeping with current best practices in transparent and reproducible neuroimaging

Neural Coupling Between Infants and Adults Supports Successful Communication

Infancy is the foundational period for learning from adults, and the dynamics of the social environment have long beenproposed as central to childrens development. Here we reveal a novel, naturalistic approach for studying live interactionsbetween infants and adults. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we simultaneously and continuouslymeasured the brains of infants (9-15 months) and an adult while they communicated and played with each other in realtime. We found that time-locked neural synchrony within dyads was significantly greater when they interacted witheach other than with control individuals. In addition, we found that both infant and adult brains continuously trackedthe moment-to-moment fluctuations of mutual gaze and infant emotion with high temporal precision. This investigationmarks a new means of understanding how the brains and behaviors of infants both shape and reflect those of their caregiversduring real-life communication

Infant and adult brains are coupled to the dynamics of natural communication

fNIRS dataset, collected on a Shimadzu LabNIRS, from infant-adult dyads while the adult experimenter played with, sang to, and read to each child