Neural responses to naturalistic clips of behaving animals in two different task contexts

Here we present functional MRI data measured while participants freely viewed brief naturalistic video clips of animals behaving in their natural environments (Nastase et al., 2017). Participants performed a 1-back category repetition detection task requiring them to attend to either animal behavior or taxonomy. There are several benefits to using dynamic, naturalistic stimuli. They convey rich perceptual and semantic information (Bartels and Zeki, 2004; Huth et al., 2012) and more fully sample neural representational space than conventional stimuli (Haxby et al., 2014). Furthermore, natural vision paradigms have greater ecological validity (Felsen and Dan, 2005), and dynamic stimuli have been shown to drive reliable neural responses across individuals (Hasson et al., 2010; Haxby et al., 2011).