Study Forrest

StudyForrest is a long-term, open neuroscience project that provides richly annotated neuroimaging and behavioral data collected while participants experienced naturalistic stimuli—most famously the full-length film “Forrest Gump.” The project’s goal is to enable reproducible research on how the human brain processes complex, real-world sensory input (audio, visual, narrative) by offering multimodal datasets: functional MRI (including retinotopy and natural vision runs), structural MRI, physiological recordings, eye-tracking, and detailed stimulus annotations (timing of scenes, audio transcripts, visual feature labels). Data are organized and shared in standard formats to ease reuse and comparison across labs.

Beyond the original movie-viewing dataset, StudyForrest expanded to include tasks probing face perception, voice and language processing, and individual differences, plus high-quality metadata and code for stimulus presentation and analysis. Its emphasis on naturalistic paradigms and open data has made it a valuable resource for studying temporal dynamics, cross-modal integration, and models of brain activity driven by rich, ecologically valid stimuli, supporting efforts in machine-learning-based encoding/decoding and reproducible neuroscience.

Part of #

• Psychoinformatics

Objectives #

• Integrate psychology with informatics (Long-term goal)
• Probe brain function with naturalistic, high-dimensional studies (Deliverable)
• Promote open science through shared data and collaboration (Deliverable)

People #

Currently associated #

• Falko Kaule (Author, Data contributor, Research team member)
• Alex Waite (Designer)
• Ayan Sengupta (Author, Data contributor, Researcher)
• Michael Hanke (Creator)

Outputs #

• A studyforrest extension, simultaneous fMRI and eye gaze recordings during prolonged natural stimulation
• A studyforrest extension, retinotopic mapping and localization of higher visual areas
• High-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI data on the perception of musical genres – an extension to the studyforrest dataset
• A high-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI dataset from complex natural stimulation with an audio movie