While prior research has explored cortical connectivity and reliability of response using fMRI, there has been far less research on these topics using other neuroimaging technologies, such as fNIRS. The purpose of this study is to investigate how different cortical regions are connected, as well as to better understand how the brain experiences and categorizes visual stimuli. The study uses fNIRS, a neuroimaging technology with better temporal and spatial resolution than fMRI and EEG respectively, to measure the levels of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the brain. Our regions of interest (ROIs) were observed while adult subjects observed ten video clips of animate and inanimate stimuli. We hypothesized that we will not only observe functional connectivity between ROIs, but also find differences in cortical responses to animate and inanimate stimuli. Finding correlation between our ROIs respective to the visual stimuli presented and differences in response to the animate and inanimate stimuli will allow us to make further inferences about neural pathways and cortical connections, create a reliability index, and begin testing our hypotheses using infants.
