Cortical response to naturalistic stimuli is largely predictable with deep neural networks

Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, activate a substantial portion of the human brain, invoking a response shared across individuals. Encoding models that predict the neural response to a given stimulus can be very useful for studying brain function. However, existing neural encoding models focus on limited aspects of naturalistic stimuli, ignoring the complex and dynamic interactions of modalities in this inherently context-rich paradigm. Using movie watching data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP, N = 158) database, we build group-level models of neural activity that incorporate several inductive biases about information processing in the brain, including hierarchical processing, assimilation over longer timescales and multi-sensory auditory-visual interactions. We demonstrate how incorporating this joint information leads to remarkable prediction performance across large areas of the cortex, well beyond the visual and auditory cortices into multi-sensory sites and frontal cortex. Furthermore, we illustrate that encoding models learn high-level concepts that generalize remarkably well to alternate task-bound paradigms. Taken together, our findings underscore the potential of neural encoding models as a powerful tool for studying brain function in ecologically valid conditions.