Inscapes

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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.

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.

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.

Multiple research groups around the world are using Inscapes for different purposes.
Here are some of the published articles by other labs:

Healthy development:

Toffoli, L., Zdorovtsova, N., Epihova, G., Duma, G. M., Cristaldi, F. D. P., Pastore, M., Astle, D. E., & Mento, G. (2024). Dynamic transient brain states in preschoolers mirror parental report of behavior and emotion regulation. Human Brain Mapping, 45(14), e70011. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70011

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:

Esfand, S. M., Querdasi, F. R., Gancz, N. N., Savoca, P. W., Nussbaum, S., Somers, J. A., Ditzer, J., Figueroa, M. B., Chu, K., Towner, E., & Callaghan, B. L. (2024). The mind, brain, and body study: A protocol for examining the effects of the gut-brain-immune axis on internalizing symptoms in youth exposed to caregiving-related early adversity. Brain, Behavior, & Immunity. Health, 42, 100880. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbih.2024.100880

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.

fNIRS:

Dubois, J., Field, R. M., Jawhar, S., Koch, E. M., Aghajan, Z. M., Miller, N., Perdue, K. L., & Taylor, M. (2024). Reliability of brain metrics derived from a time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy system. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 17500-16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-68555-9

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

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.

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