Sex differences in pediatric EEG inter-subject correlation during naturalistic movie watching: a large-scale characterization of the Healthy Brain Network EEG dataset
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Inter-subject correlation (ISC) of EEG during naturalistic viewing is increasingly used as a candidate pediatric biomarker, yet its behavior at cohort scale remains uncharacterized. We characterize ISC in 1143 children and adolescents (765 male, 378 female, ages 5 to 21) from the Healthy Brain Network EEG dataset viewing four naturalistic film clips. Three results follow. First, ISC separates narrative from abstract stimuli by 1.7 to 2.4 fold and exceeds a resting-state baseline by 42 to 99 fold, and the previously reported developmental decline replicates throughout. Second, ISC is sex-dependent: males exceed females in every movie ( t = 9.7 to 13.5; Cohen’s d = 0.61 to 0.85), concentrated in delta and theta, peaking at a frontocentral cluster and at ages 11 to 14. The direction matches an earlier report where the effect was marginal, and we resolve structure that sample could not. It survives three demographic and clinical robustness analyses, same-sex and size-matched templates, ocular component removal, and exclusion of the releases overlapping that report, and is attenuated, by approximately 10 percent adjusting for interpolation count and by 23 percent in recordings free of cluster interpolation, but not explained by differential channel interpolation. Evoked response magnitude, previously proposed as an alternative account, does differ by sex here ( d = 0.55 to 0.60) but mediates only 8.6 to 18.1 percent of the effect. Third, ISC predicts none of four CBCL bifactor dimensions after FDR correction at any feature resolution: zero of 16 grand-mean, 2064 per-channel and 16 cluster tests, with confidence intervals excluding standardized associations beyond | β | = 0.106.
S ignificance S tatement
Watching a film drives similar brain activity in different viewers, and how similar that activity is has been proposed as a marker of attention and of clinical status in children. We measured this in 1143 children and adolescents, roughly an order of magnitude more than previous work. Boys showed more similar responses than girls, an effect largest in slow frontocentral activity and peaking around ages 11 to 14. This confirms a previously tentative finding and excludes or bounds several measurement explanations for it, including the one the original authors raised but could not settle, which we find accounts for under a fifth of the difference. Against this, the same measure carried no detectable information about parent-reported psychopathology, and these data exclude all but the smallest of the associations such studies typically report. The measure is developmentally and sex-sensitive but, on this protocol, clinically uninformative.
