written by:
Tamara Vanderwal and Tobias S. Hoffmann
visual direction and animation:
Tobias S. Hoffman, man-made-blossom.com
original score and performance:
Jodi S. Vander Woude
produced and directed by:
Tamara Vanderwal
Inscapes is copyright of Yale University 2013
Inscapes is a 7-minute computer-generated animation that we created for children to watch during research brain scans. The goal of the film was to provide enough stimulation to keep children engaged while minimizing the certain aspects of cognitive processing. Inscapes features a fixed camera angle and has no scene cuts. The content is nonverbal, nonsocial and has no narrative arc. The original score was composed around the pitch and frequency of the noise the MRI makes during scanning, and the music is intended to create a homogenous mood throughout the movie.
Design
Children naturally move (much) more than adults, including during neuroimaging scans. Asking a child to lay still and “rest” for a functional connectivity scan is in fact asking them to perform an extremely difficult task. The idea for Inscapes came from the basic observation that children—even children who are hypermotoric at baseline—become remarkably still when they watch movement on a screen.
At Brainhack (brainhack.org) in Leipzig in 2012, the artist Tobias Hoffman (man-made-blossom.net) presented his work, and I almost immediately hired him to help create Inscapes. His work had a slick, technological look that I thought would blend well with the inside of the scanner. We worked together in person in Berlin to storyboard the film, trying to keep the images, shapes and movements abstract, while still relating them to nature (e.g., starlings, mantas, crystals). Back in New Haven, I would show previsualizations to my psychoanalytic supervisors. Their input and observations were remarkably influential, and are in the DNA of the film. We also piloted the material with children, and hearing their thoughts and interpretations about the movie was one of my favorite parts of the process.
“It’s about…things coming together and then moving apart.”
For the musical score, I traveled to Guelph, Ontario to sit at the piano with Jodi Vander Woude, a composer with a background in chemistry. For example, Jodi’s Master’s thesis was a violin and piano piece based on the atomic structure of the proton. Her ability to think and feel in both music and science comes through in the piece, and her ability to embrace scientific constraints (e.g., keep the sound density consistent throughout) means that the piece sounds like a beautiful, cohesive piece of music, not something that was dictated by scientific rules. She chose to use a pentatonic scale because it is a musical structure found on all continents and is frequently used in lullabies.
In postproduction, we smoothed out some of the luminance changes, and added another layer of sound effects to increase audiovisual congruency and engagement. Overall, the money spent hiring professional artists to make the movie has more than paid off. Adults like watching it, and children really like it.
Research
Multiple research groups around the world are using Inscapes for different purposes.
Here are some of the published articles by other labs:
Healthy development:
Ai, L., Craddock, R. C., Tottenham, N., Dyke, J. P., Lim, R., Colcombe, S., Milham, M., & Franco, A. R. (2021). Is it time to switch your T1W sequence? Assessing the impact of prospective motion correction on the reliability and quality of structural imaging. NeuroImage, 226, 117585. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117585
Geng F, Redcay E, Riggins T. The influence of age and performance on hippocampal function and the encoding of contextual information in early childhood. Neuroimage. 2019 Jul 15;195:433-443. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.03.035. Epub 2019 Mar 21. PMID: 30905835; PMCID: PMC6536357.
Xiao Y, Geng F, Riggins T, Chen G, Redcay E. Neural correlates of developing theory of mind competence in early childhood. Neuroimage. 2019 Jan 1;184:707-716. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.079. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30273714; PMCID: PMC6230512.
Clinical populations:
Sato, J. R., Junior, C., de Araújo, E., de Souza Rodrigues, J., & Andrade, S. M. (2021). A guide for the use of fNIRS in microcephaly associated to congenital Zika virus infection. Scientific reports, 11(1), 19270. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97450-w
Prillinger, K., Radev, S. T., Amador de Lara, G., Klöbl, M., Lanzenberger, R., Plener, P. L., Poustka, L., & Konicar, L. (2021). Repeated Sessions of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Study Protocol for a Randomized, Double-Blind, and Sham-Controlled Clinical Trial. Frontiers in psychiatry, 12, 680525. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.680525
Plewnia, C., Brendel, B., Schwippel, T., Nieratschker, V., Ethofer, T., Kammer, T., Padberg, F., Martus, P., & Fallgatter, A. J. (2021). Treatment of major depressive disorder with bilateral theta burst stimulation: Study protocol for a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter trial (TBS-D). European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-021-01280-w
Gabrielsen TP, Anderson JS, Stephenson KG, Beck J, King JB, Kellems R, Top DN Jr, Russell NCC, Anderberg E, Lundwall RA, Hansen B, South M. Functional MRI connectivity of children with autism and low verbal and cognitive performance. Mol Autism. 2018 Dec 27;9:67. doi: 10.1186/s13229-018-0248-y. PMID: 30603063; PMCID: PMC6307191.
Adult studies:
Chung, Y. I., White, R., Geier, C. F., Johnston, S. J., Smyth, J. M., Delgado, M. R., McKee, S. A., & Wilson, S. J. (2023). Testing the efficacy of real-time fMRI neurofeedback for training people who smoke daily to upregulate neural responses to nondrug rewards. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 10.3758/s13415-023-01070-y. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-023-01070-y
Kirsch, D. E., Le, V., Kosted, R., Fromme, K., & Lippard, E. T. C. (2023). Neural underpinnings of expecting alcohol: Placebo alcohol administration alters nucleus accumbens resting state functional connectivity. Behavioural brain research, 437, 114148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2022.114148
Müller, S. J., Teckentrup, V., Rebollo, I., Hallschmid, M., & Kroemer, N. B. (2022). Vagus nerve stimulation increases stomach-brain coupling via a vagal afferent pathway. Brain stimulation, 15(5), 1279–1289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brs.2022.08.019
Yoo, K., Rosenberg, M. D., Kwon, Y. H., Lin, Q., Avery, E. W., Sheinost, D., Constable, R. T., & Chun, M. M. (2022). A brain-based general measure of attention. Nature human behaviour, 10.1038/s41562-022-01301-1. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01301-1
Cohodes, E., Odriozola, P., Mandell, J., Caballero, C., McCauley, S., Zacharek, S., Hodges, H., Haberman, J., Smith, M., Thomas, J., Meisner. O., Ellis, C., Hartley, C., Gee, D. (2022). Neural effects of controllability as a key dimension of stress exposure. Development and Psychopathology, 1-10. doi:10.1017/S0954579421001498. PMID: 35034670
Ssali T, Anazodo UC, Narciso L, Liu L, Jesso S, Richardson L, Günther M, Konstandin S, Eickel K, Prato F, Finger E, & St Lawrence K (2021). Sensitivity of Arterial Spin Labeling for Characterization of Longitudinal Perfusion Changes in Frontotemporal Dementia and Related Disorders. NeuroImage: Clinical, 102853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2021.102853
Teckentrup, Vanessa, Marina Krylova, Hamidreza Jamalabadi, Sandra Neubert, Monja P. Neuser, Renée Hartig, Andreas J. Fallgatter, Martin Walter, and Nils B. Kroemer. “Brain Signaling Dynamics after Vagus Nerve Stimulation.” BioRxiv, June 30, 2021, 2021.06.28.450171. https://doi.org/10/gk4hvd.
Stoica, T., & Depue, B. (2020). Shared Characteristics of Intrinsic Connectivity Networks Underlying Interoceptive Awareness and Empathy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.571070
EEG:
Espenhahn S, Yan T, Beltrano W, Kaur S, Godfrey K, Cortese F, Bray S, Harris AD. The effect of movie-watching on electroencephalographic responses to tactile stimulation. Neuroimage. 2020 Jul 2;220:117130. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117130. PMID: 32622982.
MEG:
Vandewouw MM, Dunkley BT, Lerch JP, Anagnostou E, Taylor MJ. Characterizing Inscapes and resting-state in MEG: Effects in typical and atypical development. Neuroimage. 2020 Nov 2;225:117524. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117524. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33147510.
Open science databases that use Inscapes:
O’Connor D, et al. The Healthy Brain Network Serial Scanning Initiative: a resource for evaluating inter-individual differences and their reliabilities across scan conditions and sessions. GigaScience. 2017;6(2):1-14. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giw011
Alexander LM, et al. An open resource for transdiagnostic research in pediatric mental health and learning disorders. Sci Data. 2017 Dec 19;4:170181. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2017.181. PMID: 29257126; PMCID: PMC5735921.
Download
Inscapes
This is the original version of Inscapes, and is 7 minutes long. We strongly recommend using the sound, as the congruency of the audio and visual information add significantly to how engaging the film is, but of course this depends on the questions you are asking. If you do use the film, please cite the following paper, and if you like, let us know that you are using it. We are happy to answer any Inscapes-related questions!
Vanderwal T, Eilbott J, Kelly C, Mayes L Castellanos FX.
Inscapes: A movie paradigm to improve compliance in functional magnetic resonance imagin
NeuroImage, 2015;122; 222-32. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.07.069
Gallery
“The future is Inscapable.”