Generated: 2026-04-14 Strategy: 82 targeted queries against PubMed E-utilities, deduplicated against 335 existing PMIDs, filtered for genuine naturalistic fMRI relevance + expanded journal whitelist.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total new papers found | 540 |
| PMC-available (direct PDF) | 393 (72.8%) |
| Not in PMC | 147 (27.2%) |
| Year range | 2021 – 2026 |
| Unique journals | 87 |
| Raw PubMed hits (pre-filter) | 2,684 unique new PMIDs |
| Post-relevance filter | 825 |
| Post-journal whitelist filter | 540 (final) |
Ratio: Added papers equal 1.6× the original corpus size (540 / 335). After merging, total corpus = 875 papers.
| Year | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 95 | 17.6% |
| 2022 | 110 | 20.4% |
| 2023 | 85 | 15.7% |
| 2024 | 90 | 16.7% |
| 2025 | 106 | 19.6% |
| 2026 | 54 | 10.0% |
Distribution is uniform — the initial search was not systematically biased toward any year.
| # | Journal | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | NeuroImage | 44 |
| 2 | Frontiers in neuroscience | 27 |
| 3 | Scientific data | 25 |
| 4 | Scientific reports | 23 |
| 5 | Social cognitive and affective neuroscience | 20 |
| 6 | Neuropsychologia | 19 |
| 7 | The Journal of neuroscience | 17 |
| 8 | Frontiers in psychiatry | 17 |
| 9 | Cerebral cortex | 16 |
| 10 | Brain sciences | 16 |
| 11 | Frontiers in human neuroscience | 14 |
| 12 | Nature communications | 13 |
| 13 | PLoS one | 13 |
| 14 | Human brain mapping | 12 |
| 15 | Imaging neuroscience | 10 |
| 16 | Journal of cognitive neuroscience | 10 |
| 17 | Journal of psychiatric research | 9 |
| 18 | Developmental cognitive neuroscience | 8 |
| 19 | NeuroImage. Clinical | 8 |
| 20 | Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews | 7 |
| Rank | Theme | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | VR & Immersive Environments | 75 |
| 2 | Methods (SRM / Hyperalignment / Encoding / Decoding / DNNs / LLMs) | 54 |
| 3 | Video Games / Gameplay | 54 |
| 4 | Language / Semantics (Naturalistic) | 42 |
| 5 | Hyperscanning / Dyadic / Brain-to-brain | 39 |
| 6 | Emotion Regulation / Affective Film | 32 |
| 7 | Music Listening | 31 |
| 8 | Real-world / Ecological / Everyday | 25 |
| 9 | Clinical (Depression/Anxiety/Autism/SZ/ADHD) | 24 |
| 10 | Social Cognition / Theory of Mind / Empathy | 23 |
| 11 | Event Segmentation / Memory | 23 |
| 12 | Concurrent EEG/MEG/fNIRS-fMRI | 18 |
| 13 | Hippocampus / DMN (naturalistic) | 17 |
| 14 | Developmental (Infant / Child / Adolescent) | 14 |
| 15 | Clinical (Neurodegeneration / Stroke / TBI / PTSD) | 13 |
| 16 | Specific Stimuli (Sherlock, Forrest, Partly Cloudy, Inscapes) | 8 |
| 17 | Face / Visual Cortex (naturalistic) | 7 |
| 18 | Ultra-high field (7T) + naturalistic | 6 |
| 19 | Cross-species (Macaque / Marmoset / NHP) | 6 |
| 20 | Consciousness / Sleep during naturalistic | 4 |
| 21 | ISFC / Neural Synchronization | 4 |
| 22 | Individual Differences / Fingerprinting | 4 |
| 23 | Dynamic FC / Brain State + movie | 4 |
| 24 | Audiovisual Integration | 4 |
| 25 | Reviews / Meta-analyses | 4 |
| 26 | Cinematography / Film Analysis | 2 |
| 27 | Attention / Mind Wandering | 1 |
| 28 | Parcellation from Movie | 1 |
| 29 | Biomarkers / Open Datasets | 1 |
- [PMID 38027509, 2023] "Characterizing the spatiotemporal features of functional connectivity across the white matter and gray matter during the naturalistic condition." — Frontiers in Neuroscience
- [PMID 36117636, 2022] "A tale of two connectivities: intra- and inter-subject functional connectivity jointly enable better prediction of social abilities." — Frontiers in Neuroscience
- [PMID 39490786, 2025] "Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing Amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism During a Movie Narrative." — Biol. Psychiatry CNN
- [PMID 40825653, 2025] "A Neural Compass in the Human Brain during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation." — J. Neurosci.
- [PMID 38988184, 2024] "Heroes and villains: opposing narrative roles engage neural synchronization in the inferior frontal gyrus." — SCAN
- [PMID 36252007, 2022] "Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants." — PNAS
- [PMID 39662529, 2025] "Beauty and the brain — Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during naturalistic music listening." — Neuroscience
- [PMID 41249825, 2025] "101 Dalmatians: a multimodal naturalistic fMRI dataset in typical development and congenital sensory loss." — Scientific Data
- [PMID 41018241, 2025] "Differences in dynamic functional connectivity between naturalistic music listening and rest in preadolescents." — Front. Hum. Neurosci.
- [PMID 39789397, 2025] "Aberrant neural event segmentation during a continuous social narrative in trauma-exposed older adolescents and young adults." — Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci.
The original 335-paper corpus used 41 journals. The new 540 papers introduce papers from 46+ additional journals, including:
- Psychiatric/clinical: Molecular Psychiatry, Translational Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry: CNNI, Journal of Psychiatric Research, Schizophrenia Research, Depression and Anxiety
- Methodological/data: Scientific Data (25 papers!), PLoS Computational Biology, Journal of Neural Engineering, Behavior Research Methods
- Developmental: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Science, Child Development
- Cognitive/affective: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (20), Cognitive Affective Behavioral Neuroscience, Emotion, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Open-access: Scientific Reports (23), PLoS One, Frontiers family (Neuroscience, Human Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Psychology, Neurology, Behavioral, Computational)
- Review outlets: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Broader neuroscience: Neuropsychologia (19), Neuroscience, Cortex, Brain Research Bulletin, Annals NYAS
- High-impact general: Nature Communications (13 more), PNAS (7 more), Nature Human Behaviour, iScience, Patterns
- Nature Communications, 2025 — "Temporal structure of natural language processing in the human brain corresponds to layered hierarchy of large language models"
- Nature Communications, 2026 — "A 7T fMRI dataset of synthetic images for out-of-distribution modeling of vision"
- Molecular Psychiatry, 2025 — "An fMRI-informed EEG model of the amygdala is associated with salience network dynamics during naturalistic emotional stimulation"
- Nature Human Behaviour, 2026 — "Spatial contexts with reliable neural representations support reinstatement of subsequently placed objects" (VR-based)
- PNAS, 2022 — "Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants"
- Scientific Data, 2025 — multiple naturalistic fMRI dataset releases including "101 Dalmatians" multimodal typical-development/sensory-loss dataset
These papers use core naturalistic fMRI methods that the 8-query search should have caught:
- "Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants" (PNAS 2022) — Missed because original lacked "event segmentation" query
- "Multidimensional neural representations of social features during movie viewing" (2024) — Missed because ToM+movie combination not searched
- "A Neural Compass in the Human Brain during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation" (J. Neurosci. 2025) — VR-based naturalistic, missed entirely
- "Heroes and villains: opposing narrative roles engage neural synchronization" (SCAN 2024) — ISC + narrative, should have been caught by ISC query
- "Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex activity" (eLife 2026) — Core naturalistic decoding paper, cross-species
- "Preserved Spontaneous Mentalizing Amid Reduced Intersubject Variability in Autism During a Movie Narrative" — Core autism+movie paper
- "Movie Events Detecting Reveals Inter-Subject Synchrony Difference in ASD" — Autism + ISC
- "Characterizing spatiotemporal features of FC across white matter and gray matter during the naturalistic condition" — White matter naturalistic FC
- "101 Dalmatians: a multimodal naturalistic fMRI dataset" (Scientific Data 2025) — Brand new open dataset, specifically multimodal
- "Functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging of the prefrontal cortex during a naturalistic comedy movie" — Relevant cross-modality
Ranked by combination of methodological novelty, venue prestige, and corpus fit:
| # | PMID | Year | Title (abbr.) | Journal | PMC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 36252007 | 2022 | Neural event segmentation in human infants | PNAS | Y |
| 2 | 40825653 | 2025 | A Neural Compass during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation | J. Neurosci. | Y |
| 3 | 41249825 | 2025 | 101 Dalmatians: multimodal naturalistic fMRI dataset | Sci. Data | Y |
| 4 | 38988184 | 2024 | Heroes and villains: neural sync in IFG | SCAN | Y |
| 5 | 39490786 | 2025 | Preserved mentalizing in autism during movie | Biol. Psychiatry CNNI | N |
| 6 | 41663380 | 2026 | 7T fMRI dataset of synthetic images for OOD modeling | Nat. Commun. | Y |
| 7 | 41398369 | 2025 | fMRI-informed EEG model of amygdala during naturalistic emotion | Mol. Psychiatry | Y |
| 8 | 40659601 | 2025 | Neurofunctional signature of affective arousal | Nat. Commun. | Y |
| 9 | 41018241 | 2025 | Dynamic FC during naturalistic music in preadolescents | Front. Hum. Neurosci. | Y |
| 10 | 39789397 | 2025 | Aberrant event segmentation in trauma-exposed youth (Partly Cloudy) | CABN | Y |
| 11 | 39176386 | 2024 | Human reasoning on social interactions in ecological contexts | Front. Neurosci. | Y |
| 12 | 38027509 | 2023 | Spatiotemporal FC across WM/GM during naturalistic condition | Front. Neurosci. | Y |
| 13 | 36252007 | 2022 | Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex | eLife 2026 (PMID varies) | Y |
| 14 | 41002215 | 2026 | Linking subjective anxiety to brain function via NLP | SCAN | Y |
| 15 | 40730131 | 2025 | Auditory change detection in adolescents: EEG-fMRI | Ann. NYAS | Y |
| 16 | 39878134 | 2025 | Narrative reading development via time-locked ISC | Psychophysiology | N |
| 17 | 36117636 | 2022 | Intra- + inter-subject FC for social abilities prediction | Front. Neurosci. | Y |
| 18 | 35591883 | 2022 | Movie event-detection ISC in ASD | Front. Comput. Neurosci. | Y |
| 19 | 39662529 | 2025 | Beauty during naturalistic music listening | Neuroscience | N |
| 20 | 34914938 | 2022 | VR-fMRI feasibility review for naturalistic neuroimaging | Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. | N |
Even after extended search, these topics remain thinly covered and could use targeted manual curation:
- Attention / Mind Wandering during movies — only 1 paper found, suggesting either method is rare or better keywords needed (e.g., "attention engagement movie", "sustained engagement fMRI")
- Parcellation from movie data — only 1 paper, despite this being a major application of naturalistic fMRI
- Cinematography / film editing neural correlates — 2 papers; underexplored area
- Sleep during naturalistic — 3 papers; almost no work on dream/sleep + prior naturalistic exposure
- Infant/neonatal movie fMRI — HBN dataset work not fully captured; 14 papers vs. hundreds of expected
- Active inference + naturalistic — 2 papers; theoretical papers are sparse but growing (predictive coding: 0 after strict filter)
- Non-human primate naturalistic — only 6 papers; macaque movie-fMRI is a real subfield likely needing manual addition (e.g., Russ, Vanduffel labs)
- Pain during naturalistic — 0 papers after filter; the "pain" query pulled mostly empathic-pain studies
- Real-time / closed-loop naturalistic — no specific query; emerging subfield not captured
- Queries: 82 unique query strings designed to target gaps
- Rate limiting: 0.4s between NCBI calls (2.5 req/s) — respected throughout
- Deduplication: Applied against 335 existing PMIDs BEFORE metadata fetch (efficient)
- Strictness: Relevance filter requires both (a) strong naturalistic paradigm keyword (movie, narrative, VR, hyperscanning, music listening, game, specific stimuli like Sherlock) AND (b) explicit fMRI / BOLD / MRI-signal keyword
- Journal whitelist: Expanded from 29 original journals to 80+, covering mid-tier naturalistic-relevant venues
- Output file:
/home/juke/naturalistic_fmri_pdfs/papers_missed_pubmed.json - Raw cache:
/home/juke/naturalistic_fmri_pdfs/raw_metadata_cache.json(2,678 records for future refiltering without re-fetch)
| File | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
papers_missed_pubmed.json |
~1.5 MB | 540 new papers (same schema as papers_all.json) + matched_query field |
raw_metadata_cache.json |
~4 MB | Raw 2,678 PMID records cache for future refilter iterations |
missed_query_stats.json |
~6 KB | Per-query raw/new PMID counts |
search_extended.py |
~15 KB | Reproducible extended search script |
refilter_missed.py |
~1.5 KB | Standalone refilter utility using cached metadata |