Obtaining external neuroimaging stimuli (Narratives, HCP, CamCAN)

Three widely-used naturalistic-fMRI stimulus sets that enrich this corpus and enable comparison with a large body of published brain data. The Narratives spoken-story collection is openly available and has already been downloaded and integrated; the HCP 7T movie clips and the CamCAN Hitchcock clip require data-access requests. This page gives provenance/licensing for each and how to (re)obtain and integrate them.

1. Narratives spoken-story stimuli (obtained)

What it is. 29 naturalistic spoken-story audio clips (~3–56 min, ~5.3 h total) from the “Narratives” fMRI dataset (Nastase et al., 2021), OpenNeuro ds002345 — natural stories (Pie Man, Tunnel, Slumlord, Milky Way, Sherlock, Merlin, …), several scrambled/paraphrased control variants, and a few short TV/film audio clips. Integrated here as audio-only stimuli under data/stories/narratives/ (ASR transcribes them; audio/language/affect/event passes run; visual channels are NaN).

How it was obtained (reproducible). Downloaded from OpenNeuro’s public S3 bucket:

base="https://s3.amazonaws.com/openneuro.org/ds002345/stimuli"
for s in pieman tunnel slumlordreach ... ; do curl -fsSL -o "data/stories/narratives/${s}_audio.wav" "$base/${s}_audio.wav"; done

(The full file list is on S3 under ds002345/stimuli/; word/phoneme transcripts and Gentle alignments are also in ds002345 if you want ground-truth transcripts instead of ASR.)

License / terms. The dataset is CC0, but the audio clips are not public domain — they are shared for non-profit, non-commercial scholarly research under “fair use” (some are copyrighted TV/film audio); do not redistribute. Attribution + details: data/stories/narratives/SOURCES.md. Rights holders may request removal via the dataset’s contact.

Status. Downloaded and catalogued in the manifest; annotation runs via the standard audio config (--audio-hl --events --template).

2. HCP 7T movie-watching stimuli

What it is. Four movie runs (MOVIE1–MOVIE4), each a ~12–14 min .mp4 concatenating short (1–4.3 min) clips from two sources:

• Creative-Commons Vimeo independent films (filenames marked CC) — genuinely open,
• Hollywood film excerpts (the set published by Cutting et al.) — copyrighted, plus a repeated Vimeo “validation” clip shown across runs. Metadata files HCP_7T_Movie_Info.csv (clip origins) and HCP_7T_Movie_Clip_Timing.csv (start/stop of each clip and REST block) accompany the stimuli.

How to obtain (official).

1. Register for a free account at ConnectomeDB — https://db.humanconnectome.org.
2. Accept the HCP Open Access Data Use Terms.
3. Open the WU-Minn HCP 1200 Subjects (S1200) project page and find the “7T Movie Resources” — download the 7T movie stimulus zip plus HCP_7T_Movie_Info.csv and HCP_7T_Movie_Clip_Timing.csv. Direct project link: https://db.humanconnectome.org/data/projects/HCP_1200.
4. Open subset (optional): if you only need the freely-licensed portions, the CC-named clips are CC Vimeo films; HCP_7T_Movie_Info.csv lists each clip’s origin, so those can be fetched individually. (This will not reproduce the exact HCP stimulus, which also includes the copyrighted Hollywood excerpts and specific concatenation/timing.)

Licensing. The Hollywood excerpts are copyrighted; HCP shares them under its data-use terms for research use — do not redistribute. The CC clips carry their Creative-Commons terms (attribution).

Integrate. Put the .mp4s in data/movies/hcp/ and refresh (below).

3. CamCAN movie-watching stimulus

What it is. An 8-minute edited version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead” (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, S7E2, 1961), condensed from the ~25–30 min original while preserving the plot. It is copyrighted (Universal / the Hitchcock estate). The specific 8-min CamCAN edit — not just the original episode — is what matches the published data and its extensive existing annotations.

How to obtain (official).

1. Apply through the Cam-CAN data access portal — https://camcan-archive.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/dataaccess/.
2. Provide a valid academic affiliation and a specific hypothesis, and request the movie-watching data/stimulus. Notes from Cam-CAN: they reject vague “all data” requests and student-submitted applications — a supervisor/PI must apply, selecting only the data types justified by the proposal.
3. On approval you receive sftp download instructions; the Hitchcock stimulus is included.

Licensing. Copyrighted TV footage provided for research under the Cam-CAN agreement — do not redistribute. (The full original episode airs on some streaming services, e.g. Roku, but that is not the 8-min Cam-CAN edit.)

Integrate. Put the clip in data/movies/camcan/ and refresh (below).

Why these weren’t downloaded automatically

Both require a personal account and a data-use agreement that you must accept, and both contain copyrighted Hollywood/Hitchcock footage. I have no such accounts, and pulling the copyrighted content from unofficial sources would not be appropriate. Obtain them through the official channels above; then integration is one step.

After you obtain them

data/movies/hcp/       ← HCP 7T MOVIE1–4 .mp4 files
data/movies/camcan/    ← the 8-min Hitchcock clip

Then run the standard refresh (see ADDING_MOVIES.md) — or just tell Claude “refresh the dataset”:

tools/refresh_corpus.sh                                  # annotates the new stimuli
matlab -batch "addpath matlab; refreshAnalysis('annotations/corpus')"

The new stimuli are annotated on the same 95-channel constant-shape template and folded into all analyses and the search interface automatically. If you also have the HCP clip-timing CSV, tell me and I can align annotations to the per-clip boundaries.

Sources. HCP: 7T imaging protocol, ConnectomeDB S1200, HCP-users: movie stimuli, 7T movie clip-info wiki. CamCAN: data access portal, Cam-CAN protocol (Shafto et al. 2014, BMC Neurology), Bang! You’re Dead (Hitchcock wiki).